Review – My own Google Laptop Backpack

Since I bought a notebook I had hard times when I had to travel: where to put my notebook when I travel? I can’t put it in the luggage for the obvious reason that I can’t work with the notebook while traveling. I can’t hold it in my hand because where I live rains a lot and notebooks doesn’t like rain. I can’t put it in the briefcase cos then I have no space for the documents I usually travel with.
I needed a laptop bag. OK, but laptop backpack or a traditional briefcase-like laptop bag?

If I choose a laptop bag, then I have both of my hands occupied: in right the briefcase as always, in the other the laptop bag. This made me to choose the laptop backpack!

Probably you noticed already from my previous posts that I’m one of those who are fan of the infamous Google. This is why I chose to get a Google Laptop Backpack.

The Google Laptop Backpack costs in Europe $54.82 (USD) plus VAT. Since the weight of the laptop backpack is far from light, there were only two choices for shipment: UPS express or UPS standard delivery. One thing I adore in UPS is that you can track the package on its road, so you know when to expect it. Since UPS don’t has offices in my country yet, after the Google Laptop Backpack arrived in my country, they handed the package to DHL and they delivered the package to my front door. On time! UPS informed me that the package will arrive to me in seven days, and in my front door between 9 AM and 7 PM. So it happened: DHL rang at my front door at exactly 5 PM, on the seventh day after the laptop backpack from Google was shipped in the UK.

Now about the Google laptop backpack. Its design is kinda weird, but probably it’s just me. Seemingly it’s made 100% of polyester which is odd, since Google is probably one of the greatest supporters of the Green Initiatives. But at least it’s waterproof. On the bottom of the Google laptop backpack there’s a thick rubber layer which will come handy when I will drop it in the snow of the Alps.

The backpack has 4 pockets: 2 big in which you can easily put your laptop in (they are huge) and 2 smaller, perfect for the cables, mouse, keyboard and the charger, notebooks and pens. In one of the smaller pockets there’s a hidden(-ish) pocket which can be perfect for hiding stuff from your girlfriend and wife’s sight.
The backpack itself is around 2lbs (~1 kilogram), which is not much if you consider the rubber from the backpack’s and the consolidation of the pockets. The zippers are massive enough to not remain in your hands when you open and close the Google laptop backpack, which is good again since I usually break every zipper I encounter.

Am I satisfied so far with my brand new Google laptop backpack? If I take in consideration that the Google-store employees were extremely helpful, the shipment arrived on time to me, the backpack looks cool (and weird in the same time), the shell is tough and waterproof, I think I’m satisfied with it. So far. Will see when I manage to break the zippers.

Top 10 best practice to ruin a blog

What’s a blog without traffic? It’s a meaningless piece of crap. So if you want to ruin a blog, do with style and without taking it down completely. Here are some ideas:

1. Display a splash-screen without a link to the real content. Users will go mad, search engines even more
2. Host an exe file and force the download. Search engines will love it and when a user clicks on a result pointing to your site, they will see a warning page instead your site.
3. Transform your website in a subscription based one and ask for an exaggerated price per month
4. Rewrite your site in Flash and ask for an nonexistent Flash version, say v.22. This way even if the user upgrades his Flash plugin, they won’t see anything but the notice for upgrading.
5. The same but in Java.
6. Use a nonconformist character set. Users will can’t read it, search engines will display weird characters on the results page
7. Put a HTTP authentication prompt on the root of the domain
8. Simply use white characters on a white background
9. Install Wordpress then stop the MySQL server
10. Build a nice redirect loop, bouncing the user from one page to other in 5 second interval

That’s all, have a nice day

Selling links on your blog: Ethics or Money?

Who doesn’t like money? Everybody loves to have with a few bucks more in his pocket and I guess no webmaster is exception of this rule. The easiest way to get money from a blog or website is to advertise on it. Advertising companies is the usual and widely accepted way, this includes AdSense and AdBrite, or if we go on the affiliate network way, then Commission Junction and DoubleClick (Google). Other methods are, for example selling links on your website or simply writing so called sponsored reviews. These two are what I will argue about in this post.

Selling links on your website or blog

Selling links on your blog or website is strictly prohibited by the search engines and usually you get penalized if you don’t no-follow these links. That’s not a simple advice from the search engines, saying “You shouldn’t do it”, it’s a clear and simple rule which must be obeyed. Or you get yourself penalized and possibly removed from the search engines.
So, why are search engines so strict about link-exchanges? Because links are the base of the web and by selling these links webmasters poison the web. If links are sold on a website, those links will be adverts, thus the users have to know that the link they will follow it will land them on an advertiser’s page. The fact that every advertisement has to be clear to the consumers that it is an advert is stated in the European Community’s, the USA FTC’s and many other countries’ trade laws.
A user clicks on a link because thinks it will be useful for him. If you provide on your website links which are irrelevant to your content, you basically fool your users.
So how can you both sell links on your website and remain a good-guy? The search engines say that you should no-follow each link you put on your website and you don’t want to pass your reputation to. Like a payed link. The no-follow relation usually scares away the potential advertisers, but it shouldn’t really. They buy space on your page because they want traffic, if they don’t accept the no-follow tag, it means that they also wanted a piece of your Page Rank. And this is not really good.
Also, it’s up to you that you disclose that the link is a sponsored link or not. The ethics (and the trade rules) dictates that you should disclose, but since non-commercial websites and blogs aren’t governed by the trade rules and the ethics can also be put in the background in certain circumstances, again, it’s up to you what you do.
The no-follow tag has to be in place for every sponsored link, that’s the rule.

Sponsored reviews on your website or blog

That’s an odd situation, again. Starting from the “Everybody loves money” statement, one of the easiest way to get (almost) instant money is to write a 200-400 word long sponsored review on your blog. The problem appears when an advertiser requests from you to neither disclose that the article is a sponsored review, nor allow you to assign no-follow relation to the link which will point to the sponsor’s page. Excuse me, but as far as I my knowledge is OK, the advertiser wants to sell a product for example, not to increase its page rank by sucking a piece of your own rank.
The rules of the above mentioned linking rules should be followed in the sponsored reviews’ case, too. If you don’t apply the no-follow relation on the outgoing links from within the review, you will have issues with the search engines. That’s sure. Other than that, a sponsored review is advertisement, so your visitors should know that you wrote that article because you were hired to do so, not because you really — for example — recommend a service or product for them. But this depends on your ethics; if you’re an non-commercial website’s or blog’s author, you are not governed by any governmental trade law, of course, as far as I know.

My final thoughts are that webmsaters shouldn’t fool their visitors, and this applies to the ads and posts, too. Our websites are sponsored by the visitors, both directly and indirectly. If we fool them, we loose their confidence and they’ll never return. The worse case, when they start to spread that they were fooled by you.

Cheap Notebook for Gaming: The Acer AS5520G

It’s quite frustrating to write about this notebook. While the review process of the Acer AS5520G was pleasant, I’m not sure about whether to recommend it or not. Why? While the notebook performed excellently the hardware from within the case is no-name, except the processor and the materials used by Acer are very poor quality.

Acer AS5520G: Appearance

The notebook looks good, that’s sure. It has that typical high-contrast Acer design which attracts the human eye: outside is dark (blackish) inside almost white (grayish). The plastic material is kinda soft, just as the keys of the keyboard. When you press a key you get the feeling that if you press it a bit more, it will brake. It’s very weird.
When you open the lid, the sight is pleasant: Acer chosen for the AS5520G a display with a low response time, 8 ms and which was built with “glare” technology, called by Acer CrystalClear. The display has very good visibility in almost any situation, less in extreme bright environments when the display is much more a mirror.

Performance of the Acer AS5520G

When Acer built this notebook, they were thinking about to create a notebook with very high performance but at very low cost. If we are thinking with clear logic, this is possible only if they put no-name hardware in the case. Starting from the video card, which has an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS chipset, through the modem and lasting with the DVD-RW unit, everything is no-name. This fact however does not have impact on the AS5520G’s performance, but on the liability of the hardware.
In the performance tests the Acer AS5520G performed very well; not a miracle since Acer built it for performance. Three games were installed as usually, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, World of Warcraft and FEAR. Each game performed excellently even if the details were set to high.
Next test was viewing true high definition movies on the Acer AS5520G. Nonetheless to say that the play was flawless.
The high performance of the Acer AS5520G can be thanked to the high amount of DDR2 RAM, working at 667 MHz, the AMD Turion 64 X2 processor with 1MB L2 cache and working at 2GHz. The video card is a high performance NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS with 512 Megs of dedicated memory.

Final thoughts about the Acer AS5520G

Switching between operating systems was extremely easy since Acer provided each and every driver on its support website. Initially, the Acer AS5520G had Windows Vista Home edition installed; this is in conformity with Acer’s new philosophy which is about to spread genuine Windows Vista. Switching to any other Microsoft OS was easy enough to make me encourage anyone to change the initial OS, who doesn’t like it.
The AS5520G comes equipped with a 6 cell Li-Ion, but since the notebook has extremely high consumers, the notebook doesn’t last more than an hour and a view minutes, even with Vista’s intelligent power management knowledge. Playing a HD movie or playing a game reduces the time the notebook can run on batteries drastically.
Would I recommend it for you? The notebook performed extremely well in any situation, but under high load the temperature of the processor and the video card got hot, around 70 degrees in the case of the video card. The touchpad of the Acer AS5520G stopped responding after two days of use and the system cooler was very noisy.
My final verdict would be that the Acer AS5520G is a good notebook for its price (where I live its about $700), but if you want a reliable notebook, buy something else.

Clevo M570 notebook – The Lamborghini Diablo of the notebooks

Ever heard of Clevo? I didn’t, so when I got the call to test something from this firm my first question was what’s a Clevo. Yeah, shame on me.

So the very beginning of the review is what I’ve learned about Clevo.

Clevo is a notebook and computer peripherals manufacturer from Taiwan. Interesting is, that they ship their notebooks as barebones. That means that the notebooks are half-assembled. But don’t worry, the firm doesn’t deal with end-users but with a very limited number of OEMs, who (custom) build the notebooks, then ship to resellers and end-users. So, when you get the notebook, it’s fully functioning.

Clevo is infamous because of the quality of the materials they use when building their notebooks. M570 is neither an exception. It’s extraordinarily beautiful. The materials for building this notebook are excellent, the mate plastic used is very pleasant and is very resistant to stitches. In one word: the finishes are perfect.

The keyboard is a full size one, something almost normal at 17″ notebooks. My only issue was that as they had to create the space for the numeric pad, they pushed the Home/End/PgDn/PgUp on the top of the cursor buttons and can be reached by pushing the Fn button and the appropriate cursor key simultaneously. I hate this solution and never could get used with it.
The touchpad on the other hand is very simple yet effective. It’s sensitive enough and the two buttons (right and left click) are responsive. I didn’t encounter a problem while using it. Just with like the fingerprint scanner. It always recognized my fingerprint without a single error.

The lid is made almost entirely of aluminum, less the top where is a strip of shiny plastic.
Unlike the other notebook manufacturers, Clevo has kept the old closing system by closing hook. A system which is very secure and easy to use.

The notebook is quite heavy, it has a weight of about 4 kg (all with battery), but I think this is normal; a monster like this with a 17″ LCD on the top of a graphic accelerator, nVidia 8800M GTX, neither is pillow-light. Due to its height, it’s unlikely you will take this notebook to trips. It’s excellent for office job or for home usages though.

The M570R1 from Clevo comes with a 17.1″ WXGA with an aspect ratio of 19 to 10. Unfortunately, the surface of the screen is shiny which makes the usage of the notebook difficult in very bright environments. But every downside has its opposite, namely that the shiny surface gives extremely vivid color and great visibility, even if viewing the screen from wide angles.
Also, it’s also quite annoying that the screen of the M570 suffers from backlight bleeding in about 60-70%, which is more than bad when watching movies.

Gaming and the Clevo M570

The notebook has been tested with 3 games as usual: The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, World of Warcraft and F.E.A.R.
I think it’s better I tell you some specs of the M570R1 first. The CPU is an Intel Core2 Duo T7500 (Merom) wich is working at 2.2 GHz under maximum load and with 4MB L2 Cache. The front side bus is working at 800 MHz. The model I got had 3 Gigabytes of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 8800M GTX video card, with 512MB GDD3 VRAM.
Now that you know the specs, you can imagine how the above games run on the notebook. Truth is, that the notebook has been made especially for gaming.

The Clevo M570 and different operating systems

Miraculously, Clevo provided all the drivers for all the Microsoft operating systems on a DVD; I mean, every driver. The switch between OSes was the easiest in my career.

Verdict on the Clevo M570

It’s a piece of art! I can recommend it without hesitation for anyone, both gamers and for the business class, too. Its autonomy is excellent in its class: 2 and a half hours for office jobs and browsing and an hour and 20 minutes for gaming.
Is this a must buy? Yes, even if it’s around $2300 (~€1800) where I live.

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