I quickly took a look, and he was right. Now, there are only few possibilities there: Fan not running (which is dangerous), Fan is running but sensor not plugged in (not too bad), Fan is running and sensor is plugged in, but somehow not detected (false alarm).

I opened up the casing, saw the fan looks alright. I plugged out and plugged the CPU Fan cable back in, and voila, suddenly the fan speed is detected, and no more “Fan Error” message upon every start up.

While I’m there, with my itchy hand, I noticed that some of the PCs there were logged in using Admin account. Later I found out that the Admin account uses “1234″ as the password, which is known to everyone in the office (which is not good). Some PCs have all browsers you can imagine, toolbars, anti-virus (which is expiring in 15 days), Conficker worm, I Love You virus, and you-name-it, they’re all there.

To clean it all up, I did the following:

• Changed Administrator password, so only one guy and myself know it.
• Uninstall everything that is not necessary, additional browsers, anti-virus, toolbars, etc.
• Clean up startup registry to make sure unnecessary applications don’t automatically start-up.
• Install Microsoft Security Essentials (which is good and free), and did a full scan.
• Scheduled a daily 5PM quick scan.
• Updated the computer names to something that make sense. Previously, the computer names were like cryptic PC-4d33fa57f.
• Some PCs still on Windows XP SP2, so I quickly updated to SP3.
• Installed LogMeIn with my account, so I can connect to those PCs without having to brace the one-hour traffic everytime there are issues.

So yeah, that’s pretty much about it, but I’m happy that it looks a lot better after I left than they were.

Now, the side-effect with all these were my thumb drive that had all my utilities, and virus scanner, and so on were obviously infected. I had to remember not to plug in the thumb drive to other clean Windows PCs afterwards.

I waited till I reached home, plug into my Macbook (which is virus-resistant to Conficker and I Love You), and format the drive away, and the world is a much better place now with less computers infected by viruses.

All in a day’s work.

I made it a point that in those seven days, I would have completed all levels of Angry Birds Seasons with three stars. Prior to me leaving for Bali, I had one level with only one star and many levels still with two stars. Felt challenged, I not only completed Angry Birds Seasons with three stars, I also managed to complete Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit from tier 1 to tier 4 before the year turned 2011.

Needless to say, the book was not read as much, but I still managed to read about 100 pages of it (and learned a lot from that book in the process).

If there’s anything Angry Birds Seasons taught me, it’s patience, thinking out of the box, and ultimately persistence. It’s the patience to wait for one level each day, it’s thinking out of the box to try out new things and sometimes not-so-obvious choices, and ultimately persistence to try 10, 20, 30 times (or whatever it takes) to get three stars in every single level.

It may only be a 99-cents game, but it can teach you a lot.

Here are what I could gather about the meaning of suffix:

• No suffix: plain and basic camera, likely US/Canada model with NTSC format.
• V-suffix: It means this camcorder has built-in GPS for geotagging.
• E-suffix: It means this camcorder is an “E”uropean model (including Australia and most of Asia) with PAL format.
• Character after “/” sign: It simply means the color of the camcorder. 350/R means Red color, 350/B means Black color, and so on.

So, that’s pretty much all to it. Simple when you think of it, but without proper documentation, it’s pretty hard to understand if you’re buying the right product or not.

Disclaimer: I’m not related to Sony by any means, so if I got anything wrong, let me know in the comments. ^.^

June 24 is the date for five countries, with few more in July, and by September, 88 countries will have it. So, worst case scenario, Singapore telcos will launch iPhone 4 in September, best case in July.

Price wise, the current price may stay, that is with $38/month plan, you’re looking at S$538 for 16GB version and S$668 for 32GB version.

The motherboard was, as its name suggest, a premium motherboard, with 2 slots for PCI Express graphic cards, 10 ports USB 2.0, two Gigabit LAN, three Fireweire IEEE 1394, and two eSATA ports. It has every ports known to mankind, and for $50, I couldn’t resist a cheap upgrade to give my desktop PC a whole new guts inside.

For graphic card, I got myself Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5750 512MB GDDR5 that should be powerful enough for games in the next 3-5 years.

The end result? Here are the Geekbench scores of my desktop before and after the upgrade.

Before upgrade

After upgrade

Based on these scores alone, with $80, my desktop PC is now twice as powerful as it was, and it should prolong its life for the next 3-4 years. Good stuff eh?

It’s still not as powerful as my Macbook, but for that price, I can’t complain.

Macbook score

The result according to Windows Experience Index shows the score is up there now. It was previously 3.1. before upgrade. Yay !!!

Windows Experience Index

As for the prices in Simlim Singapore, a good start will be pricelists from Fuwell and Bizgram.

One thing I learned during my recent search for graphic card was to understand ATI Radeon naming convention. Generally, the graphic card has four digits model number, e.g. HD4650. The first digit says about the “generation”, so HD5xxx models are newer than HD4xxx. The second digit says about the graphic capabilities of the card, so HDx8xx models are better than HDx6xx. The third digit is simply to differentiate different products between the same family and capabilities.

As such, for example, HD4850 is actually a better card (and more expensive) than HD5670, but HD5670 has newer support for Windows 7 and DisplayPort, but it won’t be as capable as HD4850 when it comes to gaming.

Also, beware when buying HDx8xx or HDx9xx cards, as generally these cards will require power supply which is at least 450W+, so make sure your power supply can handle it before buying.

So, that’s it, happy buying

I will end year 2009 at $3,023 spent on electronics. Are they excessive? Let’s review.

For myself totalling $2,301.

1. Canon EOS 450D + 18-200mm lens – $1,835.
2. Sandisk 16GB SDHC card – $62.
3. Holux M-1000C GPS logger – $104.
4. Canon EF-S 17-55mm lens – $1,100.
5. Sold Canon EF-S 18-200mm lens – ($800).

For families totalling $722.

1. Kington 4GB microSD card – $14.
2. Creative Live! Cam for notebook – $29.
3. K-World DVD Maker 2 – $110.
4. Sony earphone – $49.
5. HP Mini 5101 netbook – $520.

Come to think of it, the only spending I did for myself this year were all camera-related, and here hoping all those investments actually produced great shots this year and beyond.

So, what do you think? Excessive? Or not?

As planned, I upgraded my Macbook to Snow Leopard on Friday evening without any issue. However, I like things clean, and in the past year, I have dumped so many rubbish into it, and so I thought it’s a good time to do some house cleaning.

Saturday morning, I backed up everything I have, erased my disk, and install Snow Leopard fresh. 30 minutes later, I have Snow Leopard clean-installed, and few hours later, I have all my usual apps installed as well. Restoring backup took a few more hours, as I have ~70GB of videos and ~115GB of photos.

So far, I am impressed, everything ran fast. Launching Safari is something like a second, shutting down a mere 3 seconds, not more than four.