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Recently I did some computer upgrades. First of all, I had a 22″ & 19″ monitor, but I decided since I’m getting an HD5850 I might as well go for 1920×1200 resolution. So that’s what I did. I now have a 24″ LG and 22″ V7 monitor. If you’re wondering, yes there is a large difference from 1680×1050 and 1920×1200. More screen space generally always means more productivity, and with 2 monitors you have even more space. The next major thing I did was buy a 2TB Hitachi drive, I would have gotten a smaller drive, but the price was right since it runs at 7200rpm. I won’t go lower than that on a hard drive. Next I installed Windows 7 on the 2TB drive.

At first, I thought the HD5850 was going to be bottlenecked by my Q6600, after some in game testing, this doesn’t seem to be the case at all. I’m able to run Crysis at the max settings at 1920×1200, and have very playable frame rates. I tested a few other games and the result was just awesome. I probably got more than 2x the performance of my older card, the HD4850 which I bought when it came out. I don’t plan on upgrading the motherboard/cpu until the next gen cards arrive, such as the HD6850 or something, I’m sure by that point the Q6600 will just be too slow to keep up so a full system upgrade is in store around that time

If you’re debating about the HD5870 or the HD5850, 10 – 15% more performance just isn’t worth the extra cost in my opinion, just go with the 5850. Right now, it has the best price/performance ratio out there. I didn’t get all into the benchmarks and stuff yet, I might never get to it this time. Usually I always do when I get a new card and go quite insane with overclocking. I guess I’d rather just game than play with the benchmarks

Oh yea, almost forgot.. I’m extremely impressed with Windows 7, it runs great. I’m always on the computer for work or entertainment so having a good setup is pretty important to me. Below is a pic of my current desktop

Guest post by Gagandeep Singh

Every Google Adwords user has heard about DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) in their ad copy which helps in increase CTR (Click through Rate) But we can implement this technique easily in our landing pages to get a higher conversion rate. Dynamic Landing Pages is an advanced concept of running a PPC Campaign in which you can replace the title and part of content of your landing page with the keyword present in your ads For e.g.:- If you are selling shoes in all cities of USA, but user clicked ad with keyword”Shoes in Miami” So you can use DKI on your Landing pages and put keyword “Shoes in Miami” in title and content of your Landing page. This technique saves you from creating separate landing pages for each keyword easily when you are running an online campaign for 1000s of similar keywords. Also It would help you to generate highly relevant pages so that visitor can feel that he is at the correct place and help you in achieving a High Conversion Rate.

How to Create Dynamic Landing Pages

Creating Dynamic Landing pages is very simple if your landing page is in PHP. First of all you need to create a content copy for Dynamic Page which you can replace with keywords every time a new landing page is generated. After that tag your destination url with Dynamic Keyword with Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

For e.g.:- http://yourlandingpage.com/landingpage.php? kw={keyword}

Google will replace {keyword} with the keyword which search engine used to trigger the ad. For e.g.:- if use clicked your ad with keyword “Red Widgets” then the destination url would be something like this

http://yourlandingpage.com/landingpage.php? kw={Red Widgets}

After that add the following Code Snippet to your landing page:-

<?php

// take the referer

$thereferer = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);

// see if it comes from google

if (strpos($thereferer,”google”)) {

// delete all before q=

$a = substr($thereferer, strpos($thereferer,”q=”));

// delete q=

$a = substr($a,2);

// delete all FROM the next & onwards

if (strpos($a,”&”)) {

$a = substr($a, 0,strpos($a,”&”));

}

// we have the results.

$mykeyword = urldecode($a);

}

?>

Now just put <?= $mykeyword ?> in the content copy where ever you want to put your keywords

Benefits of Dynamic Landing Pages: -

• Makes your Landing Pages Highly Relevant which helps in improving the Landing page quality and your Google Adwords Quality Score.
• Gives you the ability to use same landing page template for any number of keywords instead of creating separate landing page for each keyword.
• Increase your Conversion Rate and ROI
• You can now write unique ads and direct them to the same landing page without any extra effort.

Gagandeep Singh is a freelance writer and loves to write on gadgets, Technology, Landing Page design and Testing, SEO and Affiliate Marketing

I was on slickdeals the other day where there was a lengthy discussion about how this drive could fail due to having 5 platters and therefore produced more heat and was “supposedly” more likely to fail.

Should you be worried about it? Basically yes and no. I have had a few drives fail on me in the past, all of different brands. Some hard drives are more likely to fail than others, depending on the build quality, but basically any drive can fail at any time. Usually even if you weren’t keeping great backups of all your info you still should be able to recover most of it, but maybe not. All my drives that failed had to do with corruption. I lost no data really.

That particular drive (The 2TB Hitachi) I did purchase because I need to replace a corrupt drive. I leave my computer on almost 24/7. I have some fairly heavy hardware though and I haven’t had an issue. Some Dell computers might not be able to put up with it, since they can barely withstand running something like Prime95.

If you’re really worried about your data then you should get server class hard drives and make backups regularly. Desktop grade drives just aren’t built to last as much.

Don’t worry about drive failure too much, if it happens it happens, deal with it then

SideNote: I’ll probably never be able to fill that 2TB drive but I’ll try