Gateway T5450 Laptop M-6750 Review

I recently picked up this laptop on sale at Best Buy (of all places!) for $750.

Pros:

- 3GB of ram is great. (It means less disk thrashing, which means faster performance)

- 250 GB HDD (minus a bit for some fluff) is a good amount of storage.

- The 1.66 GHz Core 2 Duo seems good enough for my needs. The large memory helps keep it fed.

- Generally, I find performance in Vista to be fine, including with the fancy Aero interface running.

- It's lovely and shiny. The red lid, and wrist rest area look great. It's got a brushed steel look around the keyboard. The screen is one of those high gloss ones (which worried me at first, but I now like). Plus Vista looks pretty. All round, it's a lovely machine to look at.

- It's nice having the built-in webcam and microphone for Skype.

Cons:

- The 'Fn' key is in the corner of the keyboard, instead of the left 'Ctrl' key, as it is on most normal keyboards. This means I'm constantly messing up copy/paste type operations.

- The built in speakers are really weak, though this is true for most laptops.

- The integrated / shared memory graphics card won't be good for modern games, but it's fine for regular windows. Plus the extra large ram makes up for it using main memory.

- Comes with a bunch of trialware and other junk which takes a while to remove ('PC Decrapifier' got rid of about half).

- The volume slider touchpad doesn't work as well as I'd like.

- The webcam doesn't always work, sometimes requiring a reboot, though that might be due to something I've done.

- {EDIT} A quiet but slightly annoying whistling type noise sometimes comes through the sound card. I've found that it goes away when sounds are made (e.g. MP3 or windows noises), so I think the sound card drivers might be a little off. It annoyed me a little at first, but I'm used to it now.

Overall:

I'm really glad I bought it. The few niggles I list aren't a big deal for me.

{Edit - Wow, this post got a lot of hits. It seems some people have had a lot of problems with the machine. Mine's still fine 7 months on, but buyer beware...}

Heavy Iron Programming Challenge

We’ve added a programming challenge to the Heavy Iron site. People wanting to apply for a programming position can either send in their resume as usual, or have a go at our programming challenge. Doing the challenge is a good way of showing off your coding skills, and it’s also fun. (Well, I find it fun:)

The challenge takes the form of a C++ program we’ve written, which isn’t working as well as it could. It’s quite fun and graphical in nature.

To try the challenge, go to the Heavy Iron site, click ‘Now Hiring’ on the main page, then click on ‘Programming’ on the right hand side and follow the instructions.

Intel Threading Challenge

Intel are running a programming challenge based around the area of multi-threading. They pose a programming problem, and you submit code which solves the problem using multi-threading.
Winners of the rounds get cash, and the overall winner gets an Apple laptop.

It's worth having a go, because:

• Often, not many people apply because it requires effort. So your chances of winning are reasonable.
  
• You'll likely learn something, or at least dust off your skills.
• It's good to mention at interview, and gives you some more demo code.
• Being able to think of problems in terms of multiple threads/cores is becoming highly important, and a desired skill.
  

WorkflowProfiler v1.1

I've made a couple of minor changes to WorkflowProfiler.

• The 'From' field now defaults to including the username, as well as the machine name.
• There was a minor bug with the 'Text1' user string field. All user strings were starting with the character '1'.
• There was a '/' character missing in the C# example in the readme file.

We're now starting to use it at Heavy Iron, and getting some interesting results. I've been wanting this type of usage data for years... :)