ungcas

Just bought an ACER netbook and as you probably know, there is no CD drive.

One of my IT industry friends tells me that there is an overall industry move towards all notebook / laptop computers NOT having a CD / DVD drive. As happened with the demise of the floppy drive and floppy disk.

Also seems to me that notebooks / laptops now all have more USB ports than previously.

If this is true, does it mean that, in the future, software, and in fact anything currently on cd / dvd (movies?) will all be on bigger capacity thumb drives?

Appreciate your comments.

CDs are still a much cheaper cost. It would be a while before they get replaced, but I wouldn't count it out. Memory sticks are pretty cheap these days as well.

Have a new T*Omnia on its way to me, so if anyone in Bangkok is interested in a lightly used Omnia with Warranty and extra software then feel free to PM me.

Where did you find the T*Omnia for sale; did you have to order it from Korea? Anyway, congrats on the pickup and I'm looking forward to reading your review of the T*Omnia and it's comparison to the orginal Omnia.

T*Omnia looked and felt nice, but i had to sell it off again since its UI was only available in Korean

So i am back to using Omnia again, and luckily enough a new Omnia ROM version is now out with a lot of improvements and new functions.

What do you mean? Are there no english roms for it?

I got the dxhk3..is that the most recent update?

It is for official roms. There are many custom roms out there, but I believe HK3 is a good choice. I was previously using HJ1 which was also great.

HK1 and HK2 are not quite as good so if anyone else is hesitating to upgrade now is a good time.

I can 'back up' my movies bought in Thailand using Nero 6 without any problem. However I can not 'back up' my originals. Is there any software available here in Thailand that will allow me to do this easily?

Thank you.

Dvd Decrypter should do. Its free as well.

Sorry Dave, but they (again) changed the rules. We ("married to a thai") are back to 400.000 bahts in Thailand, or proof on more than 40.000/month of personal income somewhere.

So the question is a "currency question"

Have you got a reference for that? When did it happen? Certainly slipped under my radar.

The rule is 400,000 Baht in the bank OR 40,000 Baht monthly income. And it has to be the Husbands money. 2.18(6)

I was there today with my wife and this is exactly what I was told. Also, your bank account has to be in YOUR name. Secondary holder will not work.

I am looking to buy a Sony Ericsson bluetooth stereo headset, model HBH-DS205.

Besides the Sony Ericsson store(this would be more pricey obviously), does anyone have any other stores they could recommend me to? Seems most places only sell Itech or Motorolla brand.

I'm guessing MBK would be a good place to good, but there are so many vendors there. Also there is an issue of a lot of fakes so I'm a little weary of buying them from smaller vendors.

Any help would be appreciated.

I use two ISP's - True at my home and CS Lox at the office - both are ADSL and work ok.

However, I cannot download any newsgroup articles with either. I am not seeking to access the ISP's news server since I know they don't have any but I want to access msnews.microsoft.net and other newsgroups hosted on Giganews server for which I pay each month.

Until recently I could get the articles using True but now I get time outs and only a few articles download very slowly.

Are they throttling it or trying to close it off ?

Any ideas ?

It should be a port issue.. I was using newshosting before at port 7000,8000,9000 without any issue (though the speed sometimes drops to about half of max during peak hours).

I recently switched to usenet.net and had a lot of speed issues.. They don't have high ports like newshosting, but I found that switching it to port 23 resolved the speed problem..

You can put most of the blame for this on parents , as in most things to do with life , they should be taught and instilled at a very early age so they become automatic , so what happened in the years between 4/5 and 12 ? Now it has become the schools problem , what else is to become the schools problems ?

Sadly I think this is the most accurate. My thai GF's family and cousins eat sweets like there is no tomorrow. I'm talking 4 cans of coke a day + sweets whenever the craving hits. People just eat non stop. Even the adults.

I'd wait for the AIS / DTAC packages or get a HK phone. True sucks - we have a prepaid one for UBC, it has pretty bad reception.

I have tried True WiFi on several occasions, and it was always horribly slow, much worse than most free hotspots I know. In Bangkok, it was so slow I ended up using my EDGE phone instead. And that was in a "True WiFi zone" which had True advertisements everywhere. Between the slowness and the fact that True hotspots are not nearly as wide-spread as "True" marketing releases make them out to be, I'd think the included WiFi package is pretty useless.

100 minutes is a joke, even I use more than that, the wife would use it in a day. Given that 100 mintes is nothing, overtime should really be 1 Bht/min, not 1.5Bht. Seems like they want to nickel and dime you with these plans.

True Move is offering four packages: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum. Only the Bronze package has an upfront payment. All four packages require you to pay a monthly service fee (i.e. sign a service contract) for 24 months. (What you have to pay each month after 24 months, I have no idea.) If you stay within the limits set for each package, the following is what you will end up paying after 24 months for the 16GB phone:

Bronze: B 39,275

Silver: B 38,376

Gold: B 43,176

Platinum: B 50,376

According to the website: http://www.truemove.com/iphone/eng/price_plan.htm :

the monthly limits seem to be quite low. For the Bronze and Silver plans, your use of wi-fi is limited to 20 hours a month: anything in excess is 1B per minute. That's probably fine. But for voice calls, for bronze and Silver, the limit is "100." Can that be 100 minutes a month? It must be. That's like three minutes a day! Excess charge: 1.5B/minute. Use of Edge/GPRS/3G is limited to 10 hours for the Bronze plan and 1 GB for the Silver plan. I am not sure how to interpret that. I assume this means downloads from the Internet. Excess: 1B/minute.

Im considering to switch back to AIS. True is a joke.

Im living in ratchada and in my 6th floor condo i got a 2bar reception. True WiFi i paid 450B for a full month unlimited and max speed i get on downloads was 30kb/s.

I hate their Cell/TV service, but I have good luck with their DSL 3mbit here and I get over 300K most of the time.

I am bringing a couple classic iphones back with me from the states, both in good shape with all the accessories they came with. Has anyone sold iphones before? They are 8gig. How picky are shop owners as far as condition of the phone and any ideas on how much they will fetch?

any input appreciated!

thanks!

Kevin

How much are you paying for them? You are better off trying to sell it on here or craiglist. Thai shop owners won't pay you as much since they will most likely resell it to someone else.

I might know someone who wants to buy one if you can't get rid of it.

Add a vote to KMplayer for me.. I used to be a fan of VLC and MPC(which are both great in my opinion), but after using KMplayer, I'm sticking with it.

I bought a huge HD Samsung plasma a few months back but have not yet gotten a decent home theater to go with it. I noticed that there were quite a few sales going on this week, so I went to take a look. I was taken by both the Samsung and Philips systems which offer wireless rear speakers, both sound good, and both offer an iPod dock. Both run a bout 17,000 baht. But then I noticed a plethora of Thai-made systems running anywhere from 2,900 baht to about 12,000 baht. These were names I haven't heard of before (like Sherman). One system was on clearance from 10,900 to 2,900 baht.

Does anyone have any opinions, favorable or not, of the local Thai systems? I would really appeciate some input.

Those all in 1 audio systems with Wireless rears aren't very good. I owned 2 sets of them back in Canada. As someone mentioned above you can get Soken/Sherm which in my opinion isn't very good either, but will still perform better then those home theater in a box setups.

Also it depends on how big your room is. I'm using a mix and match setup with infinity Subwoofer and cerwin vega speakers in a condominum and the sound is quite good.

The discs are way too expensive to pirate at the moment. It's all downsampled stuff on DVD.

Yes, but the pirate copies appears to be genuine Bluray, complete with the right packaging, logos, etc.

And inside is a downsampled DVD disc. Most players will just play it as a DVD, so people don't realize they have bought a fake Bluray disc.

My gf bought some from China. The packaging was superb(rivals some retail packingin), but inside was crappy downsampled dvd-5 movies. Don't waste your money.

Just upgraded to 2.2fw ever since the cellular signal has gone haywire any1 else having this prob?

No problem here, but I have a factory unlocked phone from Hong Kong. 2.2 apparently breaks the "unofficially unlocked phones. Could that be your case?

Mine is factory unlock HK model only jailbroken

Signal is weak even in my 6th story condo or mayb the problem is with the True network?

Yah its true. We have 2 cell phones here in our condo using True(can't get a signal in most of the rooms), with our DTAC and AIS phones we rarely have a problem picking up a signal.

I'm sure there are many posting on this but not sure about all the particular points though, if you are getting this phone just note the following

1. Unable to increase memory storage

2. What happens when your battery dies, can't replace it, and so far apple does not provide warranty to replace the iphone battery at least in thailand

3. Don't bother watching any online internet videos because apple does NOT support flash. ( NOTE i am unaware if someone has fixed this issue or not on the old iphones

4. pretty much stuck with itunes, yes i'm aware there are alternatives to this but not as smooth as itunes, ( NOTE could be wrong on this issue am currently be looking for good alternatives but i use on linux though

if you guys find any other issues you want to point out let me know

If you want a good looking phone with a nice screen then the Iphone is a great choice.

If u are a techie like me and like to customize, tweak, and run lots of applications on your phone then you probably won't like the Iphone.

I recently purchased a Samsung omnia (it's my 4th pda phone), and I think it's an excellent phone. Only phone I would rather have more is the Touch HD, but that phone costs over 2x what I paid for my Omnia.

Greetings gang,

Let me star by saying that I am not

mobile phone savvy at all. I have a 5

year old Samsung that does me fine.

Went on my first visa run to Mae Sai

yesterday and they were selling iiphone

(assume knock offs) for 5000 Baht.

I had a play with one and they seemed

ok (to me anyway). I think they would make

great Xmas presents.

What do the more knowledgable people about

phones thins of this? I mean even if they only

lasted a year they would be pretty good value.

Would appreciate any advice.

Regards

Will

My gf bought an ICLONE from Udon Thani last year for less than 3K. The Software is garbage and though the screen is decent size and is fairly bright, it is not responsive. Save yourself the money and headaches.

Thanks for the reply. I know the shops you are talking about, but do you know for a fact that they know how to repair a PS3? I know they are putting chips in xbox 360s, ps2s, etc, but that is a far cry from being able to diagnose and fix a problem on a PS3. Only reason I am belabouring the point is because it would be annoying to drag the console all the way from Kathmandu to Bangkok, only to find out that they can't do anything.

When the PS2 was out I saw shops that had many broken units and were fixing them up for sale. I would imagine that they still do this for PS3. It doesn't seem like u have many options so might as well give it a try.

Also you might try a Sony service center as a last resort. This may cost you more, but at least you can get it working again.

I have a playstation 3, which recently stopped working. It can't recognize any discs (games, dvds, blu ray movies), rest of the machine works fine. After searching the web I understand that this is a fairly common problem, allegedly involving a defective disc controller. Problem is I live in Nepal, where they wouldn't know a PS3 from a hole in the ground, and in any case I bought the dam_n thing in Dubai, so it is not covered by any warranty. However, I do travel to Thailand regularly. Does anyone know of a place in BKK, where they might be able to fix this. Thanks!

Try Pantip or MBK. There are a lot of shops that do modding and repairs of consoles there.

Has anyone tried Nero Mobile, an alternative synch program for Windows Mobile phones (such as the HTC Touch)? Any comments if so?

If you are talking about Nero mobile multimedia player, tried it a long time ago and it sucked bad. Was buggy and didnt do what it claimed. From what i've read in forums, It still sucks.

What the above said is good. You can also try KMPlayer which is what I used. I sincerely believe its the best overall player out there right now. I used it on may systems and they play HD movies just fine, even on an old 1.86ghz system.

<br />Just upgraded my Laptop's HDD from an Hitachi 250 GB 5400 rpm to an WD 320 GB 7200 rpm!<br /><br />The performance Index was jumping from 4.4 (Hitachi) to 5.6 (WD) which is quite a lot.<br /><br />First impression is that the laptop starts now much faster. Will see with programs like Photoshop CS3 and others but the huge Excel Worksheet (192 MB) loads nearly double fast!<br /><br />So, overall a big improvement.<br /><br />Cgeers.<br />

bought one of those last month.. Now have a raid 0 setup on my laptop. It really zips through everything.. Unrar a dvd in 90 seconds. I would highly recommend it as well. The prices of hds are so cheap now

I am torn between HD ready and Full HD - any ideas guys?

Most people won't see much of a difference between 720p and 1080p on smaller screens. I would say at least a 46" or bigger to really appreciate 1080p.

I would say if the price difference is only a 3000-5000 baht go for it.

I bought a 46" sony 720p set back in January and have been extremely happy with it.

TOT told me that my max speed at my new house in Chiang Mai could be only 512/256, and True said they could only do 768/256. So I chose Maxnet who promised whatever speed I wanted.

Despite everyone's advice here, I selected the 2048/512 Indy package instead of the Premium 1024/512 which were roughly the same price. The service rep told me I could easily "upgrade" to Premium at any time, in fact she mentioned that most farang customers eventually do so. I selected the Indy package because I was previously a customer of Buddy in Bangkok and I figured Indy couldn't possibly be worse than Buddy, and besides, Buddy worked good enough for me most of the time. Well, turns out Indy makes Buddy look pretty darn good.

Maxnet Indy @ 2048/512 = Bittorrent is a complete failure, and VPN access to my stateside server is useless. Web pages load up just fine tho.

After a few minutes of accessing my VPN, the entire connection would hang, with the only solution being to reboot the router. This is a very consistent issue, as the connection is stable otherwise.

Out of curiosity I accessed the configuration pages of the Maxnet supplied SmartAX MT880 modem/router and discovered a couple things. First off, my physical connection to Maxnet is apparently only 1024/512, not 2048/512 as they claimed. This information comes from the connection status page of the modem, so I would presume it's correct. I will get on the phone with Maxnet tomorrow and see if they can rectify that.

I also discovered that their default router configuration, if tweaked a little, will give me close to full speed (1024kbps that is) torrents. The NAT setting needs to be changed from "NAPT" to "Redirect". Add a new config entry with your PC's IP address and the port # of your torrent program as the dest and local ports. Immediately after making this change my utorrent status changed to green and speeds picked up considerably. I have not tried it yet, but a similar line will probably also fix up my VPN. The bad news is that every time the router is rebooted, the NAT defaults back to NAPT, despite my saving the router config. Kinda weird.

Now I've just replaced their SmartAX router with an old Billion router I had laying around, and I get the exact same results.

Since 99.99% of their customers will never find out anyway, I wonder if this is standard procedure to provide a substandard ADSL link? Or could it be an honest mistake???

Your ADSL connection depends on how far you are located an the quality of the lines. When I was in Canada I signed up for a 1 Meg ADSL when it first came available, But due to the poor phone lines in my house I was only able to connect at 256K.

If you are paying for 2Mbit then u should definately give them a call. If it is a connection problem, no point paying for what you can't get.

As for the router, it should not lose settings if you simply reboot the router, only when you do a hard reset. Maybe make sure you are actually applying the changed settings to the router before you log out, or see if there is a firmware update that will correct this problem.

I have to replace a TV that just died. Have decided on a 32 inch LCD and the shortlist is currently:

JVC LT-Z32 EX18

Sony KLV 32S310A

Samsung LA-32S81 BX

Searching for these via Google brings up a load of Russian or Eastern European sites and nothing very helpful so I'm assuming these model numbers are for specific markets including Thailand. The prices at Siam TV are 20-22,000 bht but I have no simple way to get comparison information – anyone have one of these or can help inform my choice?

I would also recommend the Sony as well. I have the 46" model an I am extremely happy with it.. I was also considering the Samsung model you listed as will which would also be a great choice. I looked at other models like the JVC, Philips but wasn't as impressed with them.

I'm fairly new to this GPS stuff. Just heard lots of recommendations for TomTom.

However, after checking their website they don't seem to have maps for Thailand.

Money isn't any issue, can someone recommend a good good GPS software with maps for ASIA, Thailand especially?

Hi ungcas

Garmin seems to be the favorite choice here on TV, although you might want to check out my recent post about MIO G.P.S. units, thats what I'm thinking of buying because they have a good list of functions,is wide screen and the language can easily be switched between Thai & English (for her indoors!) PLUS a lot cheaper than Garmin.

Both makes can be seen at Pantip IT Plaza in BKK

Dave

Thanks. I'm going to take a look at it right now. I've been planning a trip to Pantip for a while, just havent had the chance to do so