Getting the free AMD64 PC

Biow has mentioned it already, but, yeah, we signed up this morning for the StarHub MaxOnline Christmas promotion, in return for an "upsell" of our cable-modem plan from MOL2000 to MOL6500, and a 2-year contract on this plan with a 10% discount for the duration of the contract.

So, for an additional $13.02 a month ($71.82 - $58.80) which works out to $312.48 over the 24-month period we will be getting a Compaq Presario 64-bit desktop PC (AMD Athlon 64), with a 17" CRT. Pretty worth it, considering the PC is supposed to cost well over a thousand dollars. The basic configuration isn't very usable though, so we're thinking of getting the Desktop Upgrade 2 option for another $299. Well, Biow should be getting her long-overdue PC overhaul, hopefully not too long from now.

The speed upgrade took effect almost immediately, just had to reboot the cable modem and router. Didn't have time to do a thorough test since we were on the way to work, but upon getting home, managed to find this thread which pointed to this bandwidth test page - exclusively for StarHub customers, apparently.

So far, surfing seems a tiny little bit faster. The test result came in at 2.31 Mbps - other forum users report similar results. Looks like the gap between "theoretical" and "real-world" gets bigger the higher the plan, but this is probably to be expected. That's why there's we're not at all considering the MOL30000 ("Ultimate") plan, and even this MOL6500 is a little bit beyond our current needs - and that's with *two* power users in the house, doing all-out surfing, downloading, blogging and everything. But then, you know, just a few years back, the entire NTU student and staff population of over 11,000 people were making do with just *one* E1 network connection, equivalent to 2 Mbps. So I ain't really complaining.

Well, I'd suppose we're just "hard-up" for the free AMD64 PC. Really, we are :)

(2005-11-23 22:29:14 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [1]

Comments:

Cool. Thanks for this. I'm going for the laptop as my Singtel subscription runs out this month. Cheers! B.

Posted by Brian Johnsen on November 24, 2005 at 03:03 PM SGT #

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