Friday, November 26, 2010

Packing a Punch-The Lenovo Ideapad Y560

I was recently given an opportunity to try and use one of lenovo's multimedia centric notebooks,the Ideapad Y560.In general people pericieve the Ideapads as inferior to the other offering from Lenovo - the Thinkpad series.But the Ideapads have come a long way from being an Essential series to a Multimedia and feature rich offering.When I only started using this notebook did I realise that indeed it is a heavyweight to reckon with in terms of performance and meets the consumer's day to day multi tasking and media demands.But first let us look at what this powerful machine has gotta offer

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 740 @ 1.73GHz (With 4 processing cores)
Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB (DDR3 at 1333MHZ)
Graphics ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 with 1GB of dedicated graphics memory
500 GB HDD plus inclusion of Intel's rapid storage technology(Lenovo calls this rapid drive)

The inclusion of a highend core i7 processor just makes the package a lot sweeter.Combine all of the above with a 15.6 inches HD screen and you get one of the best multimedia experiences.Performance wise the Ideapad sails through standard benchmark tests including Sisoft sandra and PC mark.The Windows experience Index should give us a basic idea on what to expect from the system



The Intel CPU is undoubtedly the stellar performer here,you can clearly see that it has a score of 7.1(7.9 has been the highest score given by Windows to a CPU)

Aesthetics wise the Ideapads offer covers with self design that give it a new funky look.They come in black and other colors depending upon the Ideapad family you have choosen.Mine came with a design which represents a snow flake theme and it has been one of the nicest things Ive seen till date :)



This notebook also has an ATI Radeon 5730 HD premium graphics GPU.Therefore I wanted to see if it could run some high octane games like Eracer or Need for speed most wanted.Both the games rendered very well at 1024X600 display resolution.



The 15.6 inches LED glare has a very bright output and a good colour production when compared to regular notebook screens out there


Among other things I am a regular user of Linux.The ATI GPU rendered some advanced desktop composition effects which are generally not supported by its regular contemporaries.As a fun factor,I wanted to take this feature for a spin and it worked out pretty well.

The speakers which come with the notebook are JBL certified and come incorporated with Dolby Home Theater experience.The laptop is Lenovo enhanced experience certified which means it will boot 66% faster than the other notebooks.The inclusion of a TV tuner and a Blue ray drive add some muscle to its Multimedia capabilities. People who are looking out for a full fledged Cinematic experience in a notebook can try this one.Its worth the money you put in....

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Grappling with Analytics and SEO

The first time I heard this Jargon was during my Internship days at Ogilvy last year.While I tried to understand the underlining advantage of it at that time,it became clear by the end of my short stint that it matters the most when your are trying to understand about your site's audience and increase the sales as a result.My interest in the same did not stop until I wanted to see how it really works or is it worth something which I can learn.

To start tinkering with this concept I needed a website on which I could practice the various know hows I get to learn.I Could not buy my own domain so instead started to see if something can be learnt if I try the same with my own blog.
Unfortunately wordpress.com still does not support Java script snippets due to security issues,so I had to Google a bit to find an alternative one.All this was to just see how far of the blog was able to reach in the Blogosphere.

Along with Analytics, SEO has also been an area of interest only to learn it practically rather than optimizing it for the sake of Search Engine Queries.Last year I found a pretty good site which would provide me the type of audience who see my blog from various geographies.

The site has a clean looking Dashboard UI based on AJAX and presents the site statistics depending on our time frame selection


As time progressed more and more features were added to site some of them informative and some of them just useless.The traffic trend analysis report shows the cumulative number of hits for a time frame.Good one if you only want to see how well your blog reaches on the information superhighway.


Then there is also the data on number of unique visitors visiting the site.It also includes the number of times your site has been translated into a regional or local language according to the audience's choice .A good addition if the site is found to be interesting and as a result a translation is performed.


Some features though I found to be too lousy,why the heck would I ever want to know what kind of browsers of OS the audience are using? The numbers give what we already know in general,looks like more number of users are using Windows 7 followed by XP and 64bit Linux.


Would have loved to use Google analytics but WordPress has no support for that!!!I am still learning the very basics of SEO and perhaps when I am ready will buy a domain for a limited time and then start to test my knowledge once again.All of this is to learn something which I found to be amusing last year!