A few things

Well, it's been an interesting holiday so far.

Tuesday was spent round at my Dad's as my brother had come over from Berlin. I haven't seen him in a while so that was good. Spent the day catching up and setting up a few things on his nice new Thinkpad laptop. This was complicated slightly by the German version of Windows XP, but we got it sorted out.

Wednesday was spent trying out the monitor I bought for my Xbox 360. It's a Dell S2309W, which is a 23" monitor. The difference is that it has true 16:9 ratio and the full HD resolution of 1920x1080. It was also cheap at £155. The 360 looks pretty decent on it, which is good. I tried out all the games on it to see how they looked and it was fine. DVDs look good on it too as the 360 does a good job of upscaling them.

Today was spent on a photography trip with Will. I picked him up and we headed off to Snowdonia and the surrounding area to see what we could find to take pictures off. We started out at Betws Y Coed before heading off to find suitably nice places, and eventually ended up at Blaenau Ffestiniog. Now, I'd heard all the things people say about this place but I thought they might be exaggerated. Oh no, it's awful. The town might be OK if it wasn't surrounded by bleak oppressive hills, and the huge piles of mining waste. We had a look at the station which was quite interesting with the narrow gauge tracks alongside the main line.

After that we drove around and found a nice place with a river. It looked really nice but there was something in it that led to some rather unpleasant looking foam build up. Very odd. After that we headed back to Betws for a hot chocolate and then I dropped Will off before heading to my sister's place. I spent the evening there catching up with her and family before heading back.

I have to admit that I've been looking for another tiny laptop. The Eee is OK but I've never got on with the keyboard and recently the Ubuntu install has been spewing out I/O errors when it tries to access the SSD. Not sure if it's software or hardware. I've been meaning to try reinstalling the original Xandros OS and see if that helps. Also I think the battery may be dead.

So I've ended up with a HP Mini Note 2133 which has just been replaced with the Atom based 2140, so that they are blowing out the 2133 cheap. These are a business orientated laptop that is only a bit bigger than the Eee but has a very large keyboard and a higher resolution screen (1280x768).

It arrived today. So far it's very nice. The CPU is a 1.2ghz Via C7-M which despite being having a higher clock speed than the Eee 900mhz Celeron , offers somewhat lesser performance. Reports vary on it though. Physically though it's a world away from the Eee. The case is aluminium and feels very solid, and the screen and keyboard are amazing. Unlike the Eee, this has a standard 2.5" hard drive with 120gb space, but it could be swapped out with a SATA SSD. The default operating system is Novell SuSE Linux. I've never got on with it to be honest and I'll probably replace it with Ubuntu, or perhaps XP. Reports are that the Windows 7 beta works well on this machine too so that might be an intriguing possibility.