Tag: Review

HP EliteBook 8740w Mobile Workstation Review

HP EliteBook 8740w

First Impressions & Overview

The HP EliteBook 8740w has a very distinct grey metal finish to the outer casing which makes it look particularly classy and durable. its scratch resistant and also helps protect against general wear and tear.

The weight of the laptop is something to be desired as it is particularly heavy, but to be honest this can be overlooked due the specification which out performs most desktop computers.

The HP DreamColor LED-backlit screen is very bright and makes most graphics pop, it really is better than most desktop LCD displays which makes me very envious when I’m using my desktop computer.

The battery on this thing only lasts about 1.5 hours on full charge, must be all that top notch hardware draining the power!

Technical Specification

As you can see it has a bit of a power house when it comes to hardware.

Who is it aimed at?

This laptop is targeted towards the creative industry whether it be for people using resource heavy applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator or Cinema 4D this laptop can handle it.

I’ve been using this laptop fine with multiple Adobe suite programs open such as Illustrator, Photoshop Dreamweaver and having Firefox open with multiple tabs…the laptop still runs very smooth.

HP EliteBook Front

What Others Think

If you want to find out more about this laptop check out what some other bloggers have been saying.

  • Solid Smack many photos and lots of reading! – Read Review
  • Fuel Your Creativity a series of mini reviews – Read Review
  • Icrontic a more technical review with photos and videos – Read Review

Getting giddy with GoMedias hand drawn wings

Please excuse the title, Wings can be one of the hardest things to draw other than the human figure, well Go Media have been very busy and only yesterday released one part of set 14, these had to be hand drawn wing vectors as usual they also have a free sample

The Wing Vectors

You can take one look at this set and say “Awesome” because Go media have really out done themselves with this one, I can only imagine how many hours it has taken to perfect each and every feather ( there’s also some bat wings in there I notice! ). The pack costs only $10 / £6 and for the time it will save you and the quality that they are compared to many other vector products. These really are for professional looks, its crazy

wings

I was looking at their other vector wing sets and these simply blow them away in the detail and craftsman ship, I’m guessing these will be mainly used by the avid tee-shirt and apparel designer, and rightly so because they will definitely take a design to a new level.

Go Media

In my eyes Go media is one of the friendliest companies on the web that I know of (or at least in the design sector), they serve up free vectors from time to time to give you a taste of what they’ve been working hard on, They more often than not reply to your comments on their blog Go mediazine, they even tweet, these are all the signs of a great company doing everything right. Getting a response from a company can go along way especially when your treated like an individual. With blogs and social media platforms available to day this means companies can be one on one with its customers and like minded people.

They share their passion for design with tutorials, that are well received by the design community, they also blog about their experiences within business, now this can be very insightful for some one starting out in their own ventures and many will be able to relate to and learn from that, making Go media a great asset.

What I did with my Go media wings

I got my set of wings and was immediately excited to see 14 different types of wings, Angel, bat, eagle etc one for every occasion. I’m not an apparel designer so my brain got thinking because I knew I wanted to do a post about them but also wanted to create something with them as well (it had been snowing all day so there wasn’t much else to do!) so I came up with this…

Guardian of Design Shard

Using one of the angel type wings from Go media I also grabbed a picture of a knight, an ancient door and a little bit of creativity.

Go media

What do you think about it, it was quite rushed and completed in about 2 hours, the light source might be a little off but I think it turned out quite well,

The styling of the wings was already really slick so I wanted to carry this type of vector styling through the image so I made some swirls with the same thick border to act as appendages coming from the wings and wrapping around the knight, as if it is alive!

Source Files

The ancient door was found on Flickr by using the Creative Commons search and the knight was found on sxc free stock site, the wings are from Go medias hand drawn collection

buywings

Your Thoughts

So what do you think of Go Media? Have you used any of their vectors in you designs? If you have feel free to post links and share your comments below… what do you think of my creation, be nice!

Review: Design Shard Now hosted with WpWebHost

wpwebhost-screen

Are you thinking about changing your hosting company, I have, the value and support is mind blowing. I’ve recently changed my hosting from Godaddy to WP WebHost, and its going great. You can find out more below in this review.

About Wp WebHost

WP WebHost is a hosting company that is dedicated to WordPress powered sites, they are a team of web masters that are enthusiastic about WordPress, Wp WebHost began when they were annoyed about other hosting companies not taking WordPress in to consideration on there servers and there fore not having the correct settings to run there blogs properly, so they created there own hosting service specifically for this cause, Wp WebHost, If you want to know more you can visit there about page that has plenty of information.

Pricing & Cost

They have one hosting plan that you can choose but they can also tailor a hosting plan specially for you needs, i think this makes it allot simpler to get started.

Freedom Plan

So the freedom plan which is what Design Shard is hosted on is great you get large amounts of bandwidth per month and can host up to 50 web sites on the same host. Ill outline the pricing and what you get below

  • 50GBs of web space
  • 500GBs of monthly bandwidth
  • Host up to 50 domain names
  • WordPress-compatible server
  • WordPress-savvy support team
  • $5/month / $80/Year / $120/2 years

Im always creating sites so I jumped at the chance to host with Wp WebHost because of the amount of websites you can have on the same host , I was hosting with Godaddy and I could only have sub domains, with this you can have up to 50 actual domains so that’s 50 website depending on your 50Gbs of storage and 500Gbs of bandwidth per month. There support team is great and would almost defiantly recommend you a hosting plan to suit your needs

I know Godaddy offers an ultimate hosting plan with multiple domains but the pricing is what put me off, if you can calculate how much bandwidth you will use per month you can clearly see how this hosting plan would benefit you.

Money Back Guarantee

Monet Back guarantee

Ive noticed on there site they have a guarantee of 100 days that if your not happy you get your money back you cant be fairer than that, they aren’t the sort of company to take you for a ride or at least I haven’t got that impression, I cant see why you would be unsatisfied.

Customer Support

when ever i had to contact support via email their response was within the day sometimes with in the hour which was great to fit round a busy schedule. Their team is well experienced with WordPress and can help you with your WordPress related problems with ease. I can only say good things about there support which you may not get with bigger hosting companies.

WpWebHost Features

So apart from the features I out lined above in pricing & cost you get more, ill outline some that stand out for me and I find excellent. But you can see the full list over on there specification page

  • 99.5% Uptime
  • Unlimited Subdomains
  • Compatible for PHP, MySQL Database, and Perl scripts.
  • Unlimited MySQL Database
  • POP3, IMAP & Web-based E-mail Access
  • Perfect Hosting Envinronment for WordPress 2.0 – 2.7

As you can see you can create as many databases as you want as well as sub domains, its perfect for hosting WordPress but you can host you PHP and database driven web sites as well.

A few Extra Details

You maybe interested to know a few things that I noted when using this hosting service.

Control Panel

wpwebhost-screen

The control panel is cPanel, you may have experience with this already or not, I had not used it but had known about it, its really simple to navigate and isn’t complex.

They have Fantastico installed in the control panel which makes installing WordPress really easy.

Mail Accounts

You can create unlimited mail accounts, I managed to import all my mail from my Godaddy online account to my new one on Wp WebHost as well as downloading them to my computer with outlook.

Domain Names

All my domain names are on Godaddy so I can cancel my hosting and keep my domains, you could also transfer them to Wp WebHost but I chose not to make life easier, you have to change the name servers in Godaddy to the Wp Webhost servers and you’ll be set to go, they provide all the information in a welcome email.

Test URL

So before you change your nameservers you can set up your site on a test URL that they provide, this ensures that everything works just fine and all you files are uploaded properly before you swap over. There is basically no downtime when swapping servers as long as your current hosting is active as well.

Guides To Moving WordPress

Transfering WordPress

I did a bit of Googling to see what I could find to help me change hosts without bothering support and I found an extremely useful article that I followed to move WordPress to my new server.

I followed this guide and every thing was fine: how to transfer your wordpress blog from one host to another host

Conclusion

Design Shard is now Hosted with WP Web Host and its been a really great experience so far, support is fast at responding to questions about their hosting and about WordPress, the features of there servers are better than what I was on at Godaddy! I would recommend them with confidence if your thinking of changing hosts.

They really do care, if you know of Naldzgraphics design blog, he was having alot of problems with his hosting and they were trying there best to help him out.

Comments

Do you have any recommended hosting providers, what works well for you? are you hosted with Wp WebHost? How is it going? Thinking about changing hosts? Got any questions? Please leave a comment.