Maxis Broadband - bewares ...

7 days FREE Trial ?

When you return the modem and packages in perfect condition, you leave with nothing.  Then you have to wait patiently until they send you your refund in a cheque.  They claimed they will send within 12 weeks.  But sometimes they may come back and see you returned the modem more than 7 days and therefore will enjoy no refund.  Then they will charge you RM 200 extra for terminating in less than 12 months !

No Minimum Contract Period ?

CHEAT again !  If you stop in less than 12 months, you will have to pay RM 200 'handling fee'.  Whatever terms they call it, they want you to stay for 12 months ... even though they said they don't.

Performance

If you have use other mobile phone operated broadband before, then you already know you will almost NEVER get 3G not to mention 3.5G or HSPDA.  You average speed is as good as any GPRS connection, about twice faster than a 56K dial up.

3GB per month ONLY !!

It is NOT highlighted anywhere but you are expected to use up to 3GB per month only !!  After that Maxis will limit your bandwidth, drop your line and totally disable you to use more than that at all !

What kind of Unlimited broadband service is this ?

IT industry is Immature

Quite frequently people who work in IT industry feel very proud because they think they are walking ahead of everyone else.

What general public needs to realize is that IT industry is still very NEW compare to other industry like finance, automobile etc.

When an industry is new it always get the hipes and a lot of jargoon that make it look really cool.

However, not all jargoons are real and sometimes some are totally bullshit.  Sometimes when a technology gets neglected because it has been in market for a while, then IT folks will come up with new fancy name to make it hot again, even though it is actually an old technology.  And this is our current IT industry stage.

ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning solution is one example that 80% of it is useless marketing terms and only 20% of it may have some usefullness.

build your own PC

recently I built another computer.  Just so that you have my perspective, the first PC I built was 8086 more than 15 years ago.

So first I shop for one and found this cost $699 ( MYR )

- Celeron C430 1.8GHz

- 1 GB RAM

- 80GB HDD

- 20x DVD-RW

- 1.44 Floppy

- 56k modem

- 400W power supply

- speakers, keyboard, optical mouse

It seems like agreat deal especially you already have monitor at home.

However, my last few "LOW COST" PC always ended up with un-diagnostable cancer so I decided to pay a bit extra for quality.  So I ended up analysing which CPU and motherboard is best Value For Money in last post.

And then I also always face some problems in those $30-$50 power supply.  Their actual supply power is unknown ( ie. not 400W, not 300W.  sometimes 150W sometimes 120W)  So this time I bought a higher than 80% efficiency power supply.

At the end, this is what I bought :

Abit AN68SV	$150
AMD 62 x2 5000+	$204
DDR2 800 2GB RAM	$84
Acbel 510W	$177
	Total $615

$615 !!!???  Cheaper than the first PC I built ( USD 200 ) with MHz CPU, RAM counted in KB and a beautiful Disk Operating System (DOS) ... haven't these 15 years changed so much!

The total paid is slightly less than what you pay for a complete low cost PC but you don't have the casing, speakers, hard drive etc.  I am fine because I can reuse all those old stuff.

At least I ended up with a good performance CPU with reliable power supply.  The only thing I worry about this new system is how long can the mother board last ?

I may FRY this board as this system will be on 24 x 7

How to compare Value for Money CPU

Recently I have to build a new PC so I was analysing which CPU is best value for money.

First I got this CPU comparison data

I put the the selling price I obtained from local sellers.  Then basically I just divide the performance marks by price to get an indication what to buy.

From this exercise, I learned the following :

Worst Buy ( More Money, no more value )

Intel E8400

AMD 5600+

Intel E2180

Best Buy ( "Normalize" Value for Money )

Intel E2200

AMD Sempron LE1150

AMD 5000+

Then I examine the mother boards used for Intel E2200 and AMD 5000+.  The graphic in AMD 7025/7050 chipset is so much better than Intel 925/G31.  AMD boards also have more fancy stuff like more support SATA drives by default, dual display, DVI output, support up to 16GB RAM ( although we don't need it but what the heck, we are talking about value for money now, not usage by money )

And AMD motherboard is cheaper than Intel's eventhough with more features.

So I ended up buying AMD 5000+ with Abit AN68SV