PC Woes – SecneM

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.

I’ve already written a few articles about my tablet laptop, the Toshiba M200, and I’ve been incredible impressed by it’s durability, adaptability, and overall functionality. So what have I forced it to do now? What other feat has the M200 surpassed? Two words: Windows 7. I decided to install Windows 7 RC 1 on my tablet for a few reasons, including: It’s free, … it’s free, and… I have a SSD. So far I’m quite impressed at the tablet’s ability to run Windows 7; the actions are very smooth, it’s responsive, fast in booting up and loading applications. The only thing I’ve noticed so far is that Aero doesn’t work at all, even if I try forcing it to start Aero I end up having to reboot as the screen just gets stuck in an endless flicker. But I can live with no Aero, considering it’s overall functionality is awesome.

So I finally figured out how to stream radio to my phone. More specifically 1.FM radio. The problem came with the fact that 1.FM uses MMS to stream their radio which would work on most non-java smartphones. Unfortunately I have a u740 Java phone and so it doesn’t work.

So after about 6 months of sporatic work, I finally figured it out. I had to use VLC as a encoder to tranform the MMS stream to a mp4-latm RTP stream. After that, then use Darwin Streaming Server to take the RTP stream from VLC and broadcast it using the RTSP protocol.

So yea, now I can rock away and tell my cell company to take that 7.00/month radio package and shove it.