Archive for category Ivan's Tech Talk
AT&T did not deliver
Posted by Ivan Bohannon in Ivan's Tech Talk on January 19th, 2009
4 weeks ago, I orderd AT&T DSL after I received a flyer promising a $200 gift card, A free 2-wire wireless home gateway, and guaranteed $35 a month fee for 2 years for the “Elite” service. A few days later I got a message saying that my service had been activated, and reminding me to install the DSL hardware. Well I hadn’t received any hardware yet so I waited. And waited. We got the first bill for the service, $35, but still no hardware and no actual DSL service had been used yet. I tried calling AT&T customer service a few times after work, but the Internet service department was always closed.
Today I gave up waiting for a hardware to show up and called them on my day off. After 38 minutes of hold music I finally got to speak with someone in customer service. The first thing they told me was that one screen in there computer said I had received the hardware, and another screen said I hadn’t. Then she said she would get the hardware right out to me. I told her NO THANK YOU! So in two days the DSL service I never got to use will get disconnected.
Comcast Cable Vs AT&T DSL
Posted by Ivan Bohannon in Ivan's Tech Talk on December 24th, 2008
Pretty interesting. the AT&T DSL Elite service which is $35 a month boasts 6 Mbps Download and 768 Kbps Upload. Comcast cable charges $49 a month for this service. This is how fast my Comcast measured at 9:30 AM on Christmas Eve.
Buying a Socket 771 Quad-Core Xeon CPU
Posted by Ivan Bohannon in Ivan's Tech Talk on December 21st, 2008
I’ve recently spent time researching Socket 771 Xeon CPUs, to figure out options when upgrading or building from scratch, finally I’ve been able to connect some dots. There are two series of Quad-Core socket 771 Xeon available: The Clovertown 53XX and the Harpertown 54XX. The Harpertown was released earlier this year and it boasts more on-board cache (12MB vs 8MB on 53XX Xeons) and higher clock rates. Read the rest of this entry »
Dual Quad-Core workstation on a budget – part 2
Posted by Ivan Bohannon in Ivan's Tech Talk on December 21st, 2008
Dell Precision 490
In my last post I wrote about trying to obtain a dual quad-core workstation on the cheap, I wrote that buying a new bare-bones dual Xeon setup (case, power supply and empty motherboard) would run $500-$700.
Well the reason I started this article is that I found Dell Precision 490 bare bones systems on E-Bay for as cheap as $150. Read the rest of this entry »
