Firefoxx

You actually can't tell the quality of the media from the brand (at least, for the vast majority of brands). Major brands like Sony and Verbatim don't make their own discs, they put their brand (OEM) on discs from the major factories, like Ritek and CMC. The best factory (and also a brand) is Taiyo Yuden, which is in Japan. It's easy to tell if a disc from the likes of Maxell or Verbatim is made by Taiyo Yuden: You simply look for "made in Japan", instead of the usual "made in Taiwan". The Japanese brands (Fuji, Sony, etc) generally used TY-made discs in the beginning, but switched to Taiwanese discs a long time ago to stay competitive. Therefore TY-made discs are virtually impossible to find in Thailand (not able to sell as much), and if you do manage to find them, they cost way too much. In the US, they're priced competitively, but not here. I always use Taiyo Yuden discs for important archives, and they'll last for at least a decade (if stored properly).

Princo is a strange beast. Sometimes they have good batches, sometimes they have bad. Sometimes they're even imitated, name brand, packaging, the works, so you never really know if you're getting a real Princo. In other words, it's inconsistent. I'm going to stop using Princo for cheap jobs, but only because the printable discs smear the ink after a short period (about a week).

Hmm, the DNS servers seem to be on the fritz again today (True). Can't connect to some sites (Thaivisa included). But when I directly set the proxy to True's, then it works fine.

I've seen a big memory stick from Kingston fail. It failed right before my eyes. However, this was a single case in very many. Be a bit careful when using them, as in don't insert/remove them quickly in succession (this kills any USB device), keep the contacts away from harm, insert properly (don't bend, insert at an angle, etc), allow the drivers to load completely before using, and reboot if the computer wants you to reboot. For keeping the contacts safe, the caps do the job, but can be very easy to lose/misplace. I therefore bought the type where the contact recedes into the body by using a slider. No more lost caps.

And FYI, they're not called memory sticks. Memory sticks are the Sony proprietary memory card, that works mainly with Sony devices. These, OTOH, are called thumb drives, USB flash drives, handy drives, pen drives, or jump drives.

Seems to be fixed now. Works as usual, not great, but at least you can connect.

That's pretty bad luck, qualtrough. What I do is I usually wait a while for a product to be out (I don't buy a product as soon as it's out... there are likely bugs and the price is not realistic). Then I do some research on user complaints about reliability. Then I actually buy it. With this, I've never had to have an electronic device fixed within warranty, and I'm not gentle with my devices (I've dropped my camcorder and camera on many occasions, and saw them bounce and roll on the pavement).

When I mentioned fixed prices, I meant at the bigger stores, like IT Mall and department stores (power buy, etc). Their prices will be fixed. Smaller shops (with generic names) will have lower prices, but many times it will be gray market. As for Thai manuals, sometimes they're available for download, sometimes not. Thing is, the cheaper digicams can be operated by practically anyone without a need for a manual.

All port 80 traffic for True is automatically routed through their transparent proxy, so that probably means that their proxy is still up. Most things are dead slow. Can't login into my US news server, and bittorrent doesn't seem to work. Skype and MS Messenger can still login, for some reason.

Yep, https doesn't work, so logging into places that require it (yahoo, etc) don't work. Since https requests don't pass through the transparent proxy, then the fact that the proxy still works doesn't help (unless you manually set your proxy, in which case https requests will go through the proxy too).

Do you mean Choke Chai farm? It's on the road to Korat, actually about halfway between Saraburi and Korat. It's a cattle farm, in the US style, with US-style cattle (not like the typical Thai cows).

They also have a steak house and some cowboy-type activities.

To get there, just take the east outer-ring road north (to Bang Pa In) all the way to the end, and follow the sign to Saraburi. When you reach Saraburi, follow the sign to Korat (Nakornrachasima) by going up the bridge. You will go up some mountains. You will see Choke Chai farm to the right as you're going down the mountains. The road to Khao Yai national park will be just a bit further.

But this gets me to wondering... how is this related to tech?

That's the thing about CDs. Their recording layer is the same layer as the label layer. If the label layer is damaged, then the recording layer is damaged... a good way to make sure someone can't read a CD is to simply use a sharp object to score the label side (scoring the recording side won't work... you can polish it and it'll still be readable). I had a bad batch of Kodak Gold CDRs, all made in Austria, of which the "gold" recording/label layer would come off in flakes. Nearly all of them did that. However, I also have a decade-old Sony "gold" CDR (made in Japan) which is still flawless. Again, it's all up to the media you use. That's why whenever I want to archive important data, I always use discs made by "Taiyo Yuden". If you buy them from the US, they're not that expensive, but if you buy them here, they're about 4-5x as expensive as normal media. Nearly all media sold today comes from Taiwan (and later China), and it's not going to be reliable.

DVDs fixed the CD problem by moving the recording layer into the middle of the disc. You can do what you like to the label layer, the recording layer won't be affected.

You probably just don't know where to look. Defective stuff is sold in flea markets all over Thailand... but Pantip isn't a flea market. You could also go to Chinatown. On Sunday evenings, they sell a lot of weird stuff in the flea markets.

There is one shop in Pantip which I find has pretty much all the toner/ink types and has good (if not great) prices. It's located on the M (mezzanine) floor (the one connected to the pedestrian walkway). It's located in the corridor (not in the atrium area) on the right side of the IT superstore. I use a toner that most places don't stock, and this place has it, and more. It's not a big shop, but you can see CD media in the front, inkjet stuff on the left side, and toners stacked up in the back. My toners cost a little less than 4,000 baht each, but they last for approximately 6,000++ pages (the last one lasted nearly 10,000 pages).

I've had bad luck with Liteon, Plextor and LG, and fairly good luck with Benq, NEC, and Pioneer. For Asus, it depends, since Asus doesn't make its own, and OEMs from the likes of Sony and Pioneer.

This is of course only my experience.

For Hong Kong, stay away (far, far away) from the tourist shop areas like Tsim Tsa Tsui. It's very likely you'll get ripped off very badly there, as it's happened way too many times before (it happened to me, and my friends). Not only that, since they're frequented by tourists, they don't have to worry about reputation, since tourists come and go. Therefore, they treat tourists like trash. They'll kick you out of their store, shout at you, and basically be very unpleasant. If you want to buy in Hong Kong, do your research VERY VERY thoroughly before attempting it. One person I knew only escaped being ripped off because he knew a HK police sergeant, and only when he threatened to call that person did the shop give him back his money.

The bigger Amorn branches will have battery cell replacement services. I don't know if Phuket has a big branch. Usually costs a couple thousand baht, depending on the configuration.

Replacement batteries can be found at various IT centers, but they might not have your specific model.

If it's just a fried chip then you can probably find an identical drive, swap the circuit boards, and hope that it works (I've done it before). It usually works if it's only the board that's malfunctioning, but some drives use the EPROM on the board to map out drive-specific parameters.

I've never (ever, not a single time, none) had to send in a electronic product for warranty service. Not once. This is after I've bought many dozens of electronic products from various places.

The thing about the warranty given for electronics is that they usually are only for a single year, and basically if you don't find any defect with the product within a few hours of purchase, chances are you won't find any AT ALL in that first year. So basically, you're paying a 20-30% premium for a very very short insurance period. If it were, say 3 years, then yes, it might be more of an issue, but those with extended warranties usually also have international warranties. The only reason I bought my DSLR here was that I needed it right away, not for the warranty at all. The warranty was useless, as I never used it. Practically everything else I bought in the US, and saved several hundred thousand baht. None have needed warranty service.

When I said to buy in the US, I am assuming that the buyer has an easy/cheap way to do this. As in, he lives in the US, goes there frequently, has friends in the US, etc. etc. This is because if you were to buy a ticket to the US just to buy some camera, it would be idiotic. The question was "where to buy", without any specific constraints and not really saying who the buyer is (not assuming that the buyer is in Thailand, and won't travel, and has no contacts), after all. For a buyer who has easy access to the US (to be able to buy the camera in the first place), in the very off chance that it were to fail within the warranty period, then he would have no problem sending it back. So yes, it's still much better to buy in the US, given that you have the means to buy it there in the first place. Me, I'm that kind of person, and there are plenty of expats in this forum who are in the same situation.

JBOD: As onthailand said.

RAID1 slowdown: True, but not really significant. The data integrity is well worth it.

RAID as backup: RAID 1 and above, it's considered instantaneous backup and usually a preventive measure for hard disk failure. It's not a "real" backup, in that it can't protect against other things (user error, loss of the whole machine through theft/fire, virii, etc. etc.). You have offline backups for that (tape, disc, whatever).

RAID on different drives: First, keep in mind that although RAID 0 speeds things up, it also increases risk in that if you lose one drive in a pair, you lose everything. It speeds things up but not by much really. Might as well just RAID 1 them, or don't RAID 0 them.

Diminishing returns: Depends on how you use your computer and what OS you're using. Generally, with 98, it was around 512MB, with XP it's around 1GB for light use, 2GB for heavy. With Vista (32), can't really say, since it's not stable enough yet. But then again, ram is DIRT CHEAP these days, so you're not paying that much, even for diminished returns.

CD shelf life: Yep, they deteriorate, but it depends on a lot of things, but two things most importantly: how you store them and how good they were in the first place. If you store them well (out of light, without physical abuse, etc), they tend to last quite a while. If you get quality (made in Japan) media in the first place, they also tend to last. I have quality CDR media that I wrote since the days of SCSI 2X speed drives (more than a decade ago) that still can be read without errors. I also have lousy DVD-R media that I wrote a few months ago and can't read today. Thing is, quality media is VERY hard to find in Thailand (I get them from the US) and if you can find it, it's too expensive. If it's very important, it's always a good idea to have at least two backups in two different types of media.

I say in the US. The ones sold in Thailand are very strictly price-controlled, so at nearly all retail places, you'll find pretty much the same prices (for authorized products, not gray market imports). The pricing set by distributors is also not very realistic... many times it's around 20-50% more expensive than in the US (using B&H as a reference, since it's a highly reputable store). You might be able to haggle at some of the smaller stores for gray market items, but even then it's not going to be anywhere as cheap as the US. This has been aggravated by the strong baht... basically shops are still selling as if the baht were at around 40 baht to the dollar. There are some (but very few) exceptions, like the wildly popular Canon low-end DSLRs, which, if you buy gray market, will be very close to the US price, probably because of the sheer volume sold.

The caching that True uses presents some other problems. One is that sites like Rapidshare or Sendspace or Megaupload tend to not work, or work very rarely. Megaupload pretty much always says that all download slots are in use. Sendspace often says that you're downloading too many files at once (since it sees the cache server) or have exceeded your daily limit, even though you're only downloading your first file. Rapidshare simply won't accept the verification code, and will never allow a download. It probably affects other sites in weird ways too.

Also, from my experience, True's proxy servers seem to be the most "censored"... in that they censor the most websites compared to other ISPs. They're also a pain to avoid.

I also have True 2.5mbit, have been using it for nearly a year. Has been a roller coaster ride. Sometimes it's EXTREMELY AWESOME, no matter the time of the day, with international speeds at around 95% line speed. Sometimes it's GODAWFULLY HORRIBLE, no matter the time of the day, int'l speeds around 5% line speed. Will be like this for days or weeks. Right now, it's leaning towards horrible... real world speeds are about 20kbytes, the speakeasy speed test page took nearly a minute to load and is giving me a result of 200kbits (from 2.5mbits). Ping is always good, it's the data transfer that's bad. Torrents are sometimes good, sometimes bad, I can't say for sure since I don't use torrents much. Certain protocols won't work properly (winMX, for one).

Be warned: True cuts the connection 24 or 48 hours after login, for no particular reason. A router will normally just re-connect, but if you have important work going on, it can be a real pain.

If you really want a good consistent connection, go for a business package (from anyone).

True's lines tend to have less disconnects since they're newer, and their CO equipment is newer. Doesn't mean that you can't enjoy the same performance from TOT's lines.

A translation of their FAQ page:

What is the HD-Cinema (HDC) service?

HD-cinema service is where programs at High Definition (HD) quality are sent via the iPSTAR satellite directly to the HDC STB at subscriber's homes for viewing later at leisure. (Only the programs that have completed download can be viewed)

What are the characteristics of this service?

- Transmission of up to 30 hours of new HD programs per month via iPSTAR satellite to HDC STB at subscriber's homes.

- Ability to watch any programs stored in the HDC STB at leisure.

- Picture resolution up to 2 million pixels, more than 5 times of normal TV.

- Resolution of 1920x1080 lines, more than 5 times of normal TV.

- Surround 5.1 sound system.

- Wild Screen (haha...) all pictures are perfect at 16:9

- Ability to add broadband internet service.

What kind of TV and accessories are required?

- To get HD quality viewing, customers should have a HDTV and use a HDMI cable to connect between the HDTV and STB.

- If internet service is also required, the customer has to provide equipment such as HUB, Switch, or splitter.

A pretty lame faq which doesn't say much. A HDMI cable actually isn't necessary for HD, a component cable is good enough.

Shop4Thai also has them listed, although again they cost in excess of 50k baht. Not really affordable or reasonable. They've been listed like this for quite some time. It's a bit twisted that you can get 24" for around 15k-20k in the US and you have to pay this much in Thailand. It's not as if you couldn't just order them from the US and get them delivered for much less, not to mention how cheap distributors could get it.

There is no real answer to this. As stated above, it's never the same for each person. You might get lucky and not pay a dime (baht) or you might have to pay huge duties.

I take it that it's one of those contracts which say you must use it for 6 months/1 year or face a penalty (the 6,000 baht, I guess). Well, there's no getting out of it, you agreed to the contract. This is a reason why I chose a non-time-restricted contract when I signed up for loxinfo a long time ago. I opted to not get a "free" router to not face penalties. Then, when I cancelled, I just simply e-mailed them and asked for a cancellation form, which I then faxed them, and got my cancellation.

Weigh your options, and see if it's cheaper to just pay the monthly fee until the obligatory usage period is over, and the cancel.

The reason why I would choose to build it myself (over the shop building it) is that the shop usually keeps any spare parts and manuals and knick knacks that come with the parts. It's common practice. Later on, when you want to add something, you need to go back to the shop and pay them for parts that should have been included with the system. Also, many shops are very shoddy in their construction... using the wrong screws (wrong thread, destroys the parts), screws too tight, screws in the wrong place, missing screws, wrong positioning of fans, wiring wrong, etc. etc. etc., the list is endless. You'd think that since they do this for a living that they'd be good at it, but no, they just keep making the same mistakes again and again. And don't get me started on the software installation... it's a nightmare.

Of course, if you're clueless about how to build a system, you might also make the same mistakes, or worse.

It's not just Pattaya, it's pretty much everywhere in Thailand. Anything beyond 22" is considered to be something that has to be special ordered from the distributor, and it will cost an arm and a leg (and then some). The cheapest I saw was around 40k baht, while in the US they cost less than 20k. The only place that I saw one on display was on the second floor (above the mezzanine floor) of Pantip. You're going to have to ask at a major dealer of either Benq or Samsung (the two that I've seen selling 24" LCDs here). Even in Singapore it's not common to see 24" sold in stores.

Or you could try Dell of Thailand. If I remember correctly, someone was able to buy a 24" from them. I don't buy from Dell of Thailand since 1. They don't have a shop presence and 2. Their web is useless, if you want to actually do something you need to *call* them (how archaic, for a computer retailer).