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The new Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro AGP became available in UK online stores just before Christmas and I was lucky enough to be able to grab hold of one. It may be a blessing to those who are not ready yet to move on to the PCI-Express platform. That may sound fine and dandy to those with a tower or desktop system, but what about Small Form Factor (SFF) owners, namely the Shuttle XPC?

In my previous post, my initial research led me to believe that the Leadtek WinFast 7600GT AGP would be the best solution for my Shuttle SB65G2 (with a G2 case). With the release of the Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP at only £30.00 extra, the answer has never been clearer. However, with it’s length almost covering an A4 sheet and the presence of two molex connectors, I was worried that I may have made the wrong choice. Have I?

I’ve recently sold off all my desktop machines in favour of the Small Form Factor (SFF) ones. I’m currently in possession of a Shuttle XPC SB65G2 with an Intel 865PE chipset running on 2Gb Kingmax PC3200 DDR memory (maxed out) and an Intel Prescott 3.4Ghz (fasted processor it will take). Despite the fact that it’s a rather ageing Pentium 4 (Core 2 Duo just came out two months ago) machine with an AGP 8x slot, it still performs relatively well. It had a Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro in it, and by “had”, I mean I sold it off on eBay very recently in hope to gather some cash for its successor.

A few of my friends asked me what RSS was when they saw my FeedBurner chicklet at the top right-hand corner on a few of my websites. I’m sure that most of you have come across it yourself on other websites. You’ve probably even heard or seen “RSS Feeds” being mentioned a lot in the online publishing world and/or blogging community (i.e. TypePad, Wordpress, Blogger, etc.).

So what is RSS? What’s so important about it? Do you need it?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and to simply put, it’s just another way for publishers to deliver/syndicate/distribute content. An “RSS feed” refers to the content being delivered, and is not commonly viewable on web browsers as it produces different code i.e. XML instead of HTML.

I came across a very very short (only two paragraphs) review on 1&1 (or 1and1) web hosting while I was checking out the Acronym Replacer plugin for Wordpress.

The first time I came across 1&1 was a few years back (circa 2000-2003) when one of their flyers fell off a computer magazine I was reading. At the time, I had a website hosted on SupaNames (which I just had moved over from GetDotted). Prior to those two web host providers, I was using various free web hosts at the time such as Geocities, FortuneCity, Tripod, etc.

After 2 minutes of browsing through their website, I found two things that immediately put me off:

1. No payment via PayPal

Imagine subscribing to Sky or a similar Cable TV provider. Imagine paying a montly flat fee for those extra channels you wanted. Imagine then, having only been given a limited number of hours for watching those channels per month. Once you’ve reached the limit, your provider will start charging you extra on an hourly rate. You have the choice of turning off you television set, or cough up the money when you get the bill at the end of the month. This analogy is exactly similar to “broadband capping”.If you haven’t got broadband at home yet, chances are, you will do very very soon. Prices have come down a lot since it was first introduced a few years ago. Fortunately, speeds have gone up and up and up. You’ve had a taste for the speed at work or at a friend’s place. So you start looking at prices and special deals by Internet Service Providers, more often than enough, that’s when you get caught.