The D-Link DNS-323 network attached storage, what a fantastic device. With it’s ultra 500 Mhz ARM processor, 64 MB of memory, Gigabit Ethernet controller, and two SATA 2 3.5″ drive bays all in a little box about the size of a 360 power supply (that ugly brick) *kawaii!!*.

Any who. With a little tweaking, this little box can do so much more than just act as a: samba, ftp, iTunes, uPnP Audio/Video Server, and DHCP server. With a little effort you can go ahead and install yourself a copy of Debian on it and do… well… anything on it. But for those who aren’t as ambitious to void their warranty, you can still use a huge collection of ‘fun_plug’ programs instead.

I’m currently working with the chroot method of installing Debian, if I can avoid flashing a custom firmware and potentially having to install a serial port, both of which void your warranty, I’ll be thrilled.

I have Debian Lenny, Apache 2, and PHP5 currently installed. I’m just working on disabling a few things to get all of the above to work smoothly together.

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T.

Toshiba M200 + Vista Ultimate = ?

Well they don’t have a word for it yet.

But anyway, I did indeed install Vista on my lowly Toshiba M200 (exact specs except I have 1GB of DDR, soon to be 2GB). So far, I’m quite impressed at the overall performance of the machine, the system lags a bit more then XP did but the functionality and ease of use went up. I’m thoroughly impressed with the Vista Tablet functionality vs XP Tablet.  Surprisingly enough, my frame rate in World of Warcraft (yes it can play on the M200) is pretty much the same as it was in XP.

One thing I noticed right away was the responsiveness of the Tablet Pen, it seems to have increased quite a lot. I also combined that with OneNote 2007 which with the improvements from 2003 has made my note taking a lot more easier.

Would I recommend upgrading to Vista on the M200?

Sure. Make sure that you have at least 1GB of memory however, and I’d recommend installing Vista from a folder on lets say a network or USB drive. The reason for this is the 24x External Toshiba drive sucks for transferring files, if you go that route be read to spend a good 1-2 hours getting to the “Installing” screen. I installed Vista from XP from a folder on my network storage. Took about 1 1/2 hours to install from the time I first ran the installer to when I could first login to the machine.

I will say that anyone who wants to upgrade will need 2 things:

And that’s it, Vista will take care of the rest. If you download/install anything else from Toshiba, you’re installing too much redundant/old software. I say you should download Toshiba Tablet PC Button Driver because it contains the drivers needed to change the Display Brightness and Rotate the screen. Once installed you can use the Vista Mobility Center (press Windows Key + X) to rotate the screen and change the Display Brightness depending on your power status.
Mobility Center
Mobility Center
P.

PC Woes

So conveniently on the day after I lose my phone my computer’s Hard Drive dies, there goes 130GB of personal data. Although I did make a recent backup since I had to send in my motherboard for repair which only came back to me about a week prior. At the moment I’m running my desktop computer with an old old old… old 80GB Maxtor drive which I figured I’d use to try Windows 7 RC while I wait for my hard drive to come back.

So what are my first impressions of Windows 7?

Well… it’s very… blue. I changed as much of the colors that as I could the second the install finished. But so far it seems decent, although my old HDD isn’t attributing anything good to the overall performance. What are my performance ratings?

Processor: 7.3

Memory: 7.5

Aero GFX: 6.1

Gaming GFX: 6.1

HDD: 4.3  (awww……)

Anyway I’ll see how much of it all improves when I get my other HDD back.