Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Nissan Cube is a bad car

I got this car as a rental during my week long business trip. I was somewhat excited to drive it because the styling is funky and I like hatchbacks. As I got more familiar with the car my opinion slowly deteriorated and eventually reached the low point. I would not recommend this car to anyone.
I will start with the good things. This car full of gadgets - voice activated radio with cellphone synchronization. Car comes with key-less entry and a lot of cup/bottle holders. I counted 7 total, but maybe there was more. There is a lot of headroom but I doubt that the tall person can use it.

Now for the bad things. The ergonomics of this car are terrible. I am not a short person but not a tall one ether. From the driver seat I could not reach pretty much anything in this car. I could not reach radio, dashboard, parking break, mirror, light switches in the front. I barely could reach steering wheel because it only adjusts up and down. The seat is utterly uncomfortable, there is no lumbar support at all, and that should be present given that the seating position is mostly vertical. Trunk space is tiny, I doubt that large piece of luggage will fit in trunk. I guess if the back seats are dropped you can fit pretty large piece in the back. The back door is large and can accommodate large TV or probably a twin mattress. The gas mileage is pretty bad for the car with such a small engine. The indicator in the car showed that I was averaging 29MPG. I guess this is because of the car's boxy form.
The materials inside are cheap as pretty much expected for the car in this price range. The interesting thing that with all the gadgets presents, the simplest features are missing. There is no automatic light turn shut off which should be present at any price range in this point of time.
I honestly cant tell who Nissan was targeting with this car and I honestly wonder how many did they sell.
I would not recommend this car even as a rental because of uncomfortable seats.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Driver Sweeper - a handy utility

Driver Sweeper is a handy utility to remove traces of the drivers that uninstallers leave behind. I did not know about it until a guy from PowerColor tech support pointed it out. Even when re-installing new version of the driver it may be handy to run this utility to remove all files from the old driver. Turned out that NVidia uninstaller leaves a lot of things behind. This utility is currently maintained so it should be safe to use.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

PowerColor Radeon 6850

I got PowerColor Radeon 6850 to replace my aging EVGA-8800GT. I run a lot of benchmarks with that card and my conclusion is not very favorable. The card works only slightly better than the old 8800GT. People report huge improvements with this card, but I did not get any of it. There is an improvement but it is not that great and mostly at higher resolutions. At lower resolutions the 6850 performs worse than the 8800!? Maybe it is my system but I am not at all happy with the result. I will keep this card for a year or so and then will probably upgrade it.

One advantage the new card has is that it consumes less power when running in plain windows and not doing anything 3D. It also allows computer to go in to low power standby. Previous card had trouble shutting down completely.

Update:
After using this card for a few days, I would say it is more or less OK. I would not consider it a bargain but since I already paid for it, I would use it until something better comes along.
It plays Crysis 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 well enough.