Ah after a long time. I’ve been so busy with job and stuffs. Now I’m bit free to do things I love to do.. GAMING!

Finally I got rid of my old Compaq laptop and bought a new ASUS G50V-X1 Gaming laptop from Newegg. It has been a long time since I played a good game. I’ve received my new laptop yesterday evening. Since then I’ve been trying out some of the highest rated games such as Crysis, COD4, Portal etc. So far I’m very impressed with this baby. It looks like a gaming laptop and performs like one. I wish ASUS had put a 9800GT in this system.

Config: Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26G, 15.4″ WSXGA+, 4GB DDR2, 200GB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce 9700M GT 512MB DDR3 VRAM and other usual stuffs. It comes with 2 years international warranty and 1 year ASUS Accidental Damage Warranty.

I’m not going to do any review since there are plenty of them over notebookreview.com. But I did a little benchmark with 3DMark06 and Crysis (with Crysis benchmark tool) and the results are pretty much same with notebookreview benchmark.

Apart from the laptop which comes with 200GB 7200RPM HDD, I purchased another 250GB 7200 RPM HDD. Now I have a sweet 450GB HDD. I also got a Cyber Snipa Gamepad because I don’t want to torcher the keyboard like I did with my last laptop (had to replace the keyboard once :p). Along With the Laptop I also received a Logitech MX518 Gaming mouse, Alone in the dark DVD,  and a cool Backpack for FREE! Overall I’m pretty satisfied with my purchase.

My laptop is pretty old and configuration is not that great: Intel core solo 1.8GHz, 945GM, and 1GB RAM. Initially I thought Leopard won’t run on this config, but I thought of taking a chance. Previously I tried Tiger on this same laptop which worked as expected. So far Leopard is running great. It takes about 15 seconds to boot up and 5 seconds to shut down.. :O Speed is amazing. It takes less than 500MB RAM with all those eye candies and runs pretty smooth and very responsive. Applications open up in within a second. It is hard to believe considering the fact that its a non Apple computer. I have Arch Linux installed which takes about 300 MB RAM with default Gnome installation without any eye candy and windows XP which takes about 500MB RAM with many startup programs. Overall I’m very impressed with speed, simplicity and of course look!

Now the bad news. As usual, Intel 3945ABG wireless card is the culprit; my wireless is not working. Not a problem. I’m ordering a USB wireless card which is mac compatible. And headphone jack is not working. So I have to stick to boring laptop speakers till I get a USB sound card (not anytime soon).

I’m planning to transfer all my works from Windows to Leopard once I get that wireless card. Let me try out leopard for sometime. Specialy I want to see how web development goes on Mac. If I like it then a MBP is locked on my wishlist.

this is what happened so far and here is the epilogue of this series.

So, I awaited couple of days for a refund from webortel.com but as expected, no refund, mail or whatsoever. Then I escalated the dispute into claim. Paypal asked me to wait for couple of days till they finish off with their investigation. So I did. In the meantime http://www.webortel.com vanished from internet. After 3 days I received a mail from Paypal and here is what it said:

Claims must be for payments for tangible, physical goods that can be shipped, and not all other payments, such as payments for intangibles, for services or for licenses and other access to digital content.

And that basically ended my hope of getting a fair justice. I’m not sorry for $4. I’m upset because I got scammed! and that guy is roaming around, free. Today I was doing some search on webortel (what I should have done before buying the domain). Here is what I found on a popular forum:

Well, Webortel is run by the biggest hacker in town called mawali, he had this directi account from 2 years with $20,000 Balance in it. And started selling domains for $4. He has earned $10,000 in just 3 weeks from webortel.com, and is happy by scamming you people. And also, You will not get your domains back

So, next time you decide to buy a domain, do a little research on the company. A simple google search will give you plenty of information. Try to call up their business line to see if it’s a valid number. If the price is unusually low then be aware, it could be a scam.

If you have tried to access my blog in last 24 hrs, you’ve got the same error message like everyone else. I’ll recap what happened in last 24 hours. As usual, in the morning I opened my inbox and noticed a mail from webortel (my domain registrar, yet another Indian mushroom .com company) and the subject line:

Completed: Deletion of clearpixels.net

As soon as I saw that I was like :O and I quickly opened the mail. And here is what it said:

Your Domain Name clearpixels.net has been Deleted. This Domain Name will no longer be active, and will be available for anyone to Register

Read the rest of this entry »

Yep, that’s one of the domain names suggested to me. Finding a good domain name could be more difficult than searching a needle in a haystack. It all started when I was working on my friend’s blog. Everyone encouraged me to start my own blog. Well, I’m not the kinda guy who likes keyboard (except W A S D buttons :p ). Then I thought it would be a good idea to have a personal website, atleast it looks good on resume too. And so the hunt for domain name began. So, I started asking my friends at IRC and forum. In case you don’t know, here is a piece of example which will give u some idea about these guys:

[13:59] <amitava> Filled-Void: kalpik does not like ur domain name..
[13:59] <Filled-Void> :<
[13:59] <Filled-Void> kalpik, whats wrong with techripples?
[14:00] <Filled-Void> techripple.com!
[14:00] <kalpik> sounds like tech nipples
[14:00] <Filled-Void> oh well thats good
[14:00] <Filled-Void> he might even get extra hits
[14:00] <hullap_> lol kalpik
[14:01] <amitava>

Head over to forum for more of such examples. So, I dropped the whole idea of suggest-me-a-domain name and finally decided to go for clearpixels.net because I’m more into web designing n stuffs. Also the name ‘clearpixels’ sounds cool in a way.

Once I’ve registered my domain name and setup Wordpress, my next problem was theme. It this point I realized it the ‘choice’ which is the root of all problems.

Neo: “Choice, the problem is choice.”

Yep, that’s it. Zillions of themes to choose from, which brought me to square one: suggest-me-a-theme! And the end result is this - what you are reading now. Anyway, a very lame start you might say BUT stay tuned. Most of my posts will be on various tutorials, tips, tricks etc. Who knows, you might learn something new!