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GEEK! Product Reviews

A Small Orange webhosting – initial thoughts….

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Well, I’ve been with my new host, A Small Orange, for just over a week now so I thought I’d do a quick “first thoughts” kind of review.

So, what do I think? Well, for the mere $10 a month that I pay (in the UK, that’s just under £7.50), it is really good value. I chose the Medium package which gives me 400MB of space and 25GB of bandwidth per month. I also get cPanel and Fantastico with a huge range of unlimited features such as unlimited FTP accounts, email, mailing lists and even MySQL databases (which is very unusual for hosts).

The uptime is generally good. I’ve had a couple of outages but the customer support is very good and I can change to any one of their 60 or so servers at any time. They are often available for instant online chat support but if not you can just submit a ticket and they respond very quickly (usually within a couple of hours).

They also have customer forums but these aren’t recommended for support as the ASO staff don’t check this very regularly. However, the ASO staff often post details about downtimes here, so it is recommended users view this forum if their site goes down before contacting staff.

So, in general, I really like this host and hope I can stay with them for years to come. The prices are generally really good value, and they also offer VPS for customers who don’t like shared hosting.

Take a look and see what you think. They offer 30 day money back guarantee and there is no contract so you can cancel at any time.

Netbooks are the future. They just are.

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I’ve been having a good play-around with a couple of recent netbooks. The first one being the EeePC 701 and the second being the Acer Aspire One. They are both really good laptops. They both will run Windows XP (there is some difficulty one the EeePC – I’ll explain later), they are both relatively fast, they both have decent battery life, and both have expandable memory.

The EeePC 701 uses an 8GB solid-state drive whilst the Acer Aspire 701 uses a 120GB normal hard drive (although it is available with a solid-state drive). 8GB will not get you very far, even if you don’t have any music or video, but you can expand it with any SD or SDHC card. The 120GB hard drive in in the Aspire is relatively fast whilst fairly quiet, although it does drain the battery quite a lot. And ofcourse, because the solid-state drive has no moving parts, it saves battery and is less suceptable to damage from drops.

As for the battery power, they are both very good. The EeePC will run for just over 2 hours whilst working quite hard, and the Aspire just a tad longer. I believe the Aspire does have a slightly better battery, but there isn’t a huge amount of difference and both are fine for going on short trips.

Neither have an optical drive which is quite a downside if you want to watch a DVD on the move. You could add a USB DVD drive but this would probably hammer the battery life. There are netbooks available that will cope with a USB DVD drive, but these two will both struggle to make it through a DVD movie on one charge.

The screen size is definately a bit of a pain on the EeePC. The 7″ display is quite hard to work with, especially in Windows XP. It will run 800×480 without scrowling the screen, but you can run 800×600 or 1024×768 with the catch that you’ll have to scroll down the screen. The 8.9″ on the Aspire One (also available in 10″) is much more usable and can run 1024×768 without screen scrolling.

As for trying to install Windows XP, it can be a right nightmare on the EeePC. It will install fine, but trying to get programs to work properly is utter hell. Windows Live Messenger seems to fail horribly, and then you get issues which collide with other pieces of software. The Aspire is much better and will install software with ease. It will even run Google Earth with fantastic performance.

I really think notebooks will be the future. They aren’t perfect at the moment, and you definately get what you pay for. I wouldn’t go and buy one right now, but give it a few months and I think they will definately be the thing to have by next year.

When you see the potential of these mini laptops, you begin to think why you lug around these huge 15″ laptops which are several kilograms heavy every day.

They just don’t have the power right now. I couldn’t bear having to use a 1Ghz computer for general use – I can’t live without my lovely dual core processor – but I think this technology will come as processors get smaller and less power-hungry over time.

So, no, don’t go buying one now. If you’ve got a decent laptop now, it isn’t worth it. But give it a little while, and hopefully manufacturers will be able to get more RAM, bigger harddisks and better processors without costing a bomb. It will all come in time.

Top five plugins I’d recommend for WordPress

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Well, you’ll probably know GEEK! (and most of the other sites I run) strongly rely on WordPress. It’s a fantastic platform, not only for blogging. It’s extremely customizable and you can just spend hours messing around with all the config with it. It’s also extremely reliable and as long as your server is up, it is there open to the web. And if you’ve got WordPress installed with cPanel on your server, running your website is a dream. Perhaps sometime I’ll do a post on cPanel.

Anyway, I also use quite a few plugins with GEEK!. Some of them are vital to me, and some of them I just use to add a bit of feel to the site. So, I thought I would do a top 5 to show my favourite and most loved plugins for WordPress. Remember, all plugins are free and a lot of them are open source so don’t restrain yourself. However try not to have too many as it will hog up resources on your server and your webhost may not be too happy about this. I would definitely say don’t use more than 15 simultaneously.

Here are your top 5:

  1. Statpress: A fantastic stats system for any blog or site hosted with WordPress. It monitors all the traffic coming into your site, and manages it into individual visitors, pageviews, spiders (bots) and feeds. You can look at detailed statistics on what browser, OS, country and versions each IP that visited your site was using. You can monitor specific IPs and search for specific results. The only thing I don’t like is that you can’t get it to ignore your own IP (as far as I know anyway) so that might be an issue for some users. Try it anyway, it uses little resources and doesn’t use Javascript so won’t miss anyone not using Javascript.
  2. Sidebar Login: I like this plugin because it means any user can log onto their account with your site by just using the sidebar of your site. Saves having to go to the wp-login page. I mainly have it because I’m lazy, but also because it is very useful. I prefer it to the meta widget WordPress provides.
  3. All in One SEO Pack: A great plugin if you want to get your site out on the web search sites (which… most people do). Will sort out your META title, description and tags for you. Just type in what you want and it will make sure its on search engines like Google and Yahoo.
  4. Genki Announcement: A simple but useful plugin which allows you to post announcements on your site. It proves quite useful if you need to alert users of scheduled downtimes or other simular warnings. It’s not compatitable with all themes, but most work so you should be OK.
  5. Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam (external): A great system for comment SPAM reduction. Will add a CAPTCHA to your website’s comments form so that real users will be seperated from computer spam. You can also set it so registered users that are logged in do not have to fill the CAPTCHA in. If you’re getting lots of spam, this is the plugin for you.

So there you have it – my favourite WordPress plugins. They are all compatitable with WordPress 2.7 (I’ve tested them) so you should be fine. See what you think. If you’ve got any other great plugins you’d like to recommend, throw in a comment!

Asus EeePC 1000HE on the way with 9.5 hour battery claims!

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Asus’ latest addition to the well known EeePC series is the very good looking 1000HE. Asus claims that it has a 9.5 hour is battery life which is perfect for that long plane flight or tiring car trip.

EeePC 1000HE

Above: EeePC 1000HE

It doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive so film-watchers will be dissapointed, but it does have a 160GB hard drive (plus 10GB online storage provided by Asus) with Windows XP preloaded so you could load a few movies onto the hard drive. I’m not sure that the inbuilt graphics card would cope with very high quality films but it should be able to cope with a fair quality film.

It also comes with a 1.67GHz processor which is quite enough for word processing and document handling in Windows XP, plus the fair sized keyboard will make typing much less of a chore on such a small device.

It also has 1GB RAM preloaded, so you might even be able to do a little bit of multitasking on it.

The screen size is thereabouts 10″ so it’s not great unless you have good eyes, but most people should find it just-about usable – and any user of the previous EeePC’s should have no problem.

I was unable to find any information about the actual screen resolution, but I would guess it was either 1024×600 or 1024×480 judging by previous models of the EeePC.

The product itself has a 1 year warranty, but the battery warranty is only 6 months – so you may have to replace the battery ever so often to keep that 9.5 hour claim up.

Generally, it looks like a nice piece of kit for any regular traveller. I won’t use one myself because I love my 13.3″ dual core laptop which is fine for my travels, and I don’t think I could live without a DVD writer (or even player) built in as I watch a lot of DVD’s on my laptop.

It’s price tag is about 300$ in the US, which means it should be around £230 in the UK.

What do you think of it? Take a look at the Asus promotion page at http://promos.asus.com/US/1000HE/ASUS/index.html

Internet Explorer 8 RC1

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Well, Internet Explorer 8 RC1 has arrived, and I decided I ought to download it for a review here on GEEK!

And, honestly… as usual, I’m not overly impressed. It’s install isn’t too bad, weren’t any problems and after about 20 minutes of installing the setup requested a reboot. So, after a swift reboot and Vista’s ‘Completing Setup’ procedure, I fired it up. The first thing I noticed, which really annoyed me, was that it had gone and set itself as the default browser without even mentioning it or checking it with me.

So, after that, it confirmed a few settings with me, and then opened up the homepage. So, knowing me, the first thing I did was go to www.geekonthepc.com and got open a new post (I’m writing this post now in IE), and annoyingly I already see the problem that it hasn’t rendered the page properly. Why?! Why does Google and Mozilla get it right by Microsoft just can’t seem to understand how a browser is supposed to render a page.

[Sorry, the images linked to this post cannot be found. Please try later.]

So, if you want my opinon, I don’t like it. Microsoft’s claims that it’s the simpler and better to use than any other browsers are just utter rubbish. What are they doing? So, for me, I’ll be sticking with Firefox and Chrome, and you should too.