Smile4u

I'm using the same and get average download of 800kbps. Have been slower last 2 weeks though (+-500kbps). Compared with mobile /air card as option, I find Hutch to be 5 time faster (download speed). So I'm happy

Btw, they guarantee only 150kbps minimum on the papers I got when signing up. But I never seen slower than 300kbps download here.

Looking for a new Desktop.

Budget is 40.000 incl 64bit OS and 6 GB memory DDR-3.

CPU: Quad core 8400 - 9550, 2.66GHz.

Monitor 22' - 24'.

Not into gaming or photo, only heavy multitasking.

Brand names / model recommendations?

Their prices are way too high.

Webcam and Keyboard priced 10-15% higher than shops in Pattaya.

TV Lcd and Plasma even more.

Desktop and notebooks same.

Cant see why any would buy here, when you pay much more, and must wait longer for delivery.

Check their prices!

Visa as normal in Vientiane per today 17 September. No new demands when apply for 2 entry TR visa. All applicants got their visa, including those with many back to back TR visas.

This info from one of Pattaya visa agents with 2 minibus up there - today.

Thanks to the false rumors, they get houndreds of calls from worried expats. All for nothing.

Search bupa thailand and I bet you find lower prices. I checked out the expats club group policy and their premium was 3.000 more than Bupa (similar coverage). Thaivisa health insurance is (similar) too expensive due to average high age of members, and many claims (so they told me).

Bupa has a wide range of plan / coverage. Been with them many years, they raise premium according to age, never more than 20%.

Raise 45% ??? = you know what to do.

Painful and uggly IMO. Would never have a gf with tattoo. Doesn't look very nice when get older. Nature created people beautiful, why mess with nature?

Agree wth you Ps. When people have a terminal illness, cancer,aids, or other, people should show more respect. If a man get cancer, people feel sorry for him. If he get aids, some people trash him and say you got what you deserve. It can happend to anyone even when careful, and use protection. Do not forget that.

MrHammer, your last posts in this thread, is full of contradictions. You off topic when start talk about ladyboys/gays. Are the majority in Africa ladyboy/gays? Your second sentence show that even your friends has catched what you call the usual stuff from ladies. So much for (Quoting), your friends dont go through 150+ bargirls in a year. That only confirms that also your friends catch std's. Earlier you posted that your friend had a gf with 6 - six previous abortions. OMG. Seems that your friends are no better or worse than Ps friends.

Interesting that people who visit or live in Thailand, still love to drag other foreigners down.

Just read that around 4000 people in Pattaya have tested positiv for hiv/aids. That's only the known cases. How many more are there? Takes only 1 to give you hiv. Takes only 1 broken condom too. Be careful out there.

Quote from Post 1:

"Other program that is 100% free, and download drivers relatively fast?"

"Who is freeware?" is even in heading!

THAT was my Questions?

Since a few seems to derail from this topic's Q u e s t i o n:

Driver problem was there 11 months b e f o r e I myself try update drivers. Before.

I didn't do anything until last week after last visit to servicecenter. They say my brand is famous for driver problem and overheating.

Clean install tried twice before, still same problems.

Back up and restore point maked frequently.

My OP was about free download programs - please back to topic.

More than 10 visits to service center in less than 1 year, all problem driver related. Thats the reason.

In addition; blue screen - white screen - hang - freeze - unable to online, you name it...........

I wish all was running well, my warranty ends next month.

EC226 work in Pattaya?

Where can it be tested / bought?

Any users is same area - how is your Download/Upload speed (TV speedtest)?

I tend to advise people (depending on who) to stay away from HP and similar brands of computers as the specs may look good but the brands and quality of components isnt the best, and you also are paying alot more than what it would actually cost to get one built with higher performance and better components.

For example your ram would only be 800mhz, but you could build a system with better specs for cheaper and have ram that is 1066mhz. If your screen is 23" and you want to play games, that video card isnt the best option.

The only benefit I see in buying a computer from HP or similar brand is that they usually have a good warranty, but HP and other computers in my experience do have the same amount of problems as any other computer.

It all depends on the person though. I'm still deciding wether or not I will sell custom built computers to peoples budgets or not with my business.

Warranty is No 1 for me. My Acer (less than 1 year) have been in for repair more than 10-ten times already. Wish I had taken the 3yr optional warranty.

Seen many reports warranty problem if you build yourself, or get a custom made for you. As always is LOS, warranty and customer service might be hit or miss.

Agree that I can get better specs by going your route, Quad Q9550 2.83 Ghz and GF9500GT 1GB and 1066mhz memory is tempting (Thb 24.000 quoted) - but - again Warranty win over the better specs.

Budget 30.000: ASUS - DELL - HP - LENOVO - other?

from Pcworld.com

Speed Test: Windows 7 May Not Be Much Faster Than Vista

Though Windows 7 edged out Vista in our lab tests, you may not notice much of a difference.

Nick Mediati, PC World

May 7, 2009 8:00 am

All About Windows 7

• Windows 7's "XP Mode" Won't Run on Some CPUs »
  
• Windows 7 Speeds on Solid State Drives »
  
• Is Windows 7 for Netbooks a Non-Starter? »
  
• Hands On: Running Windows 7 on a Netbook »
  
• Teaching Mac OS X a Few Windows 7 Tricks »
  

Improving performance is one of Microsoft's design goals with Windows 7, and many early reviewers (including ours) have said that the new OS seems peppier than Vista. But tests of the Windows 7 Release Candidate in our PC World Test Center found that while Windows 7 was slightly faster on our WorldBench 6 suite, the differences may be barely noticeable to users.

We loaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate on three systems (two desktops and a laptop) and then ran our WorldBench 6 suite. Afterward we compared the results with the WorldBench 6 numbers from the same three systems running Windows Vista. Each PC was slightly faster when running Windows 7, but in no case was the overall improvement greater than 5 percent, our threshold for when a performance change is noticeable to the average user.

The largest difference was 4 points--102 for Vista versus 106 for Windows 7 on an HP Pavillion a6710t desktop. Our other two test machines showed similarly minor performance improvements: A Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop improved by 1 point (from 138 on Vista to 139 on Windows 7), and a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop improved by 2 points, from 97 on Vista to 99 on Windows 7.

WorldBench 6 consists of a number of tests involving ten common applications, including Microsoft Office, Firefox, and Photoshop. On the individual tests, the benchmark results were generally within a few percentage points of each other. One notable exception, however, was Nero 7 Ultra Edition, where Windows 7 made significant improvements, ranging from a 12 percent speedup to a 26 percent speedup, depending on the PC we used in our tests. Although we have yet to confirm it, PC World Test Center Director Jeff Kuta notes that this difference may be due to updated hard-disk drivers in Windows 7. Any improvements to Windows 7's disk support will be more noticeable in an application like Nero, which uses the hard drive heavily. The test involving WinZip, another hard-drive-dependent task, also showed marked improvement under Windows 7.

We also measured a noteworthy 7 percent speed increase in our Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP3 (DirectX) test on the HP Pavillion desktop, which had an nVidia GeForce 9300GE graphics board. nVidia's drivers appear to be better optimized for Windows 7 than Windows Vista.

In contrast, however, each of the systems took slightly longer to perform the tests in Microsoft Office and Firefox when they were running the new operating system than when they were running Vista.

Of course, it's important to remember that we performed these tests with the release candidate of Windows 7. Though the operating system's features likely won't change in the final version, Microsoft's engineers may still find ways to tweak the code to improve performance.

If these test results remain consistent with those for the final version of Windows 7, the news will likely be disappointing to many Windows users. One of the major complaints about Windows Vista was the fact that it was consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 doesn't significantly improve that situation, it may fail to convince people to move away from Windows XP.

That said, there may be other areas we didn't cover in our testing--such as startup times--where Windows 7 may outperform Windows Vista by a wider margin. The best way for you to get a feel for Windows 7's performance is to download the release candidate and take it for a test drive on your system.

<H2 class=articleBodyContentHed>How We Test</H2>We used three PCs in our testing: a Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop, an HP Pavillion a6710t desktop, and a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop. The powerful Maingear comes equipped with a 3.2GHz AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU overclocked to 3.71GHz, 4GB of memory, and dual ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics processors. The Pavilion, a mainstream desktop, features a 2.6GHz dual-core Pentium E5300 with 3GB of memory and an nVidia GeForce 930GE graphics chip. Lastly, the Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop packs a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of memory, and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3670 graphics card. On all three systems, we ran our WorldBench 6 benchmark suite on a clean installation of the 32-bit edition of Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1 and repeated the process with the Windows 7 Ultimate release candidate (again, the 32-bit version). We made both operating systems current with Windows Update, and we installed the most current hardware drivers available.

Note : Windows 7 RC must be downloaded before 20 August.

Very good to hear oldgeezer. My ATM made it a litle further out of the wallet now. Thoose specs + new monitors just so sleek. My missus want a word with you though, after you said "I could not be happier with it". (she wants a nose job instead)

From where did you download free for use driver detective?

I tried a few, softpedia etc, all demand pay before use.

Want to buy a Desktop. Found this one today:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/documen...=reg_R1002_USEN

Hp pavilion A6685L

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33Ghz 4MB L2 Cache 1333Mhz

(ranked 12 on cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html)

HD 320GB 3G sata

RAM 2GB DDR2 800Mhz (update to 4GB + Thb 1.200)

Nvidia GeForce 9300GE 3D 256MB

With monitor 2009 20' Lcd - asking price 24,900

With monitor 2309 23' Lcd full HD - asking price 27,900

For heavy multitasking is this a good choise?

Gaming is secondary, but is graphic card good enough for average gaming?

Upgrading Ram to 4GB, is 800Mhz enough for heavy use?

Any HP buyers here - hp good or not?

My ATM card is itching so I hope for your comments

You never mentioned your OS. Lets assuming its XP/or Vista. You run a driver scan with one of these

free utilities (which are not free in the long run) to check for outdated drivers?

At the end you were presented with a list of outdated drivers.

Have you ever tried to update with device manger? There's a tab which says "update driver"

Click on it and you will know it is outdated or not.

If an update is needed for some hardware brand you will find the very updated version on their web site!!

I would check with Acer Taiwan or Acer US in case you really need to update something.

I appreciate your help. OS is Vista.

Device manager "update driver" used last week, only managed to update 1 driver.

Multiple driver scanners reported 7 - seven similar drivers outdated (or more).

Device manager said Nvidia was up to date.

Nvidia com reported 1 outdated and downloading now.

Will follow your advice about Acer's other locations. Thank you.

Search the laptop model and you may find blogs with down loadable software drivers. All the makers have web sites with downloads.

That was the first I did, support.acer-euro was very outdated. Drivers listen there is older what I already have.

Blogs also tried, mostly outdated, year 2006-7.

http://www.driverguide.com/

Not a freeware - wanted USD 14.95 before can download driver - just tested it!

Any other recommendation that is 100% free to download driver update ???

Found many outdated drivers in my laptop.

Tried many software who advertise free download - well they are not.

At last drivermax is free, but overloaded as they say. So only got 1 download in 1 week.

Other program that is 100% free, and download drivers relatively fast?

webfact: in your opinion does NVIDIA Geforce 9100M G takes 1.2GB of the memory?

Change to another graphics card with its own memory an option?

Using Acer laptop, dont know if its much to choose from.

I read about the topic PAE "be careful playing with the PAE switch, it can make applications not work properly, and in some cases prevent the system from booting".

Sounds dangerous for a non expert.

Still I'm confused if my laptop have 2813MB or 3113Mb avaiable.

When I multitasking both CPU and memory go to the roof frequently.

Thats why I'm hunting for the last 0.5 - 1.0BG that might be avaiable under Vista (?)

PAE unknows to me. (instruction pls) Control panel/system dont mention PAE.

However: Control panel - advanced sysyem settings - performance - settings -advanced - virtual memory "total paging file size for all drives: 3113MB.

Change - "recommended 4219MB - curently allocated 3113MB (and dont give option to adjust).

Windows Task Manager says as always: Physical memory Total 2813MB

Problem is that my system only "see" 2.8GB, when I've read before 3.2-3.3GB is normal when using Vista.

Shure some of the tech experts here know "how to do" ?

Waiting for Windows7 - 64bit (THB 10.000)?

system type: 32-bit operating system