It’s pretty interesting to see the Maxis Broadband Windshield Sunshade on the cars at PC Fair. They really spent a lot on marketing. I like the tag “My car is as cool as my blog”. Somehow, if you are choosing for a broadband, choose smart. You should check out my speedtest at PC Fair. =)

I found out that the most interesting part about Penang December PC Fair is not about booth babe because they don’t have any here, but it’s the broadband booth. After coming through the entrance and walk for about 2 minutes and you will find the broadband company booth all side by side.

It’s really a big broadband war inside, when you passed by,

1. P1 Wimax (4G), they will ask you to POTONG (means cut in Malay)
2. Streamyx (Copperline ADSL) will ask you to upgrade,
3. Digi Broadband (3G) will tell you they have got no contract and free modem,
4. Maxis Broadband (3G) will tell you broadband discount for postpaid user,
5. and Celcom Broadband (3G) will tell you, nothing, in fact they just keep shouting Celcom Broadband at me.

They set up their booth nicely and they got a lot of promoters! One broadband company has like more than 20 promoters and I guess they are fighting to see who has hired the most promoter. They just keep shouting and calling you to join and subscribe their network.

I am a Streamyx user and I will still stick with Streamyx, I only change if there’s alternative for wired Internet, perhaps a new company that provides FTTH 100Mbps package at less than RM100 per month, for sure I will potong (cut).

P1 Wimax has got a nice booth, free big paper bag, plenty of laptop for Internet surfing, a lot of promoters and (some) nice girls giving out balloons.

The promotion that is interesting is the GET 1 MONTH FREE AND RM160 DISCOUNT. Discount is always better than getting a free Wiggy (P1 prepaid wireless modem.

I speed test their machine and got a 2.4mbps speed. Not bad, I can’t find any P1 10mbps Wiggy to try though.

Next up is Digi Broadband booth, with a lot of yellow colour promoters but no free gift. I believe Digi Broadband is the best 3G broadband provider in Malaysia, with fast speed, good service, and good price when compare to Maxis and Celcom, the other two 3G broadband provider.

Their promotion in PC Fair is PAY RM88 FOR EXPLORE PLAN (NORMALLY RM108) AND GET A FREE MODEM. NO CONTRACT. The best of their promotion is no contract where P1 is contract based.

And I speed tested too, with P1’s speedtest site. It shows that it has a 1.9, almost 2mbps speed, still hardly reach maximum of 3.6mbps of HSPDA network. This is nice because it’s faster than my house 1.5mbps line.

Streamyx’s booth didn’t interest me, they have got many promoters, but not as many as Digi and P1 have. So I went to speed test again and they got the fastest speed. Showing a 3.4mbps download, which I believe is running on a 4mbps plan. I want this speed and I want to ugprade, but I don’t have cash, so I need more sponsors. Hehe.

I am so not interested in Celcom Broadband, have heard a lot of bad comment about their service. The promoters don’t know their things around.

When I tried to speed test, the speed test site can’t even load and they told me they have got a lot of customer using their network so it’s slow. I got fed up and didn’t even get to speed test after waiting for few minutes. FAILED.

Lastly, I went to Maxis Broadband booth, green is their colour and they have balloons too. Actually I am also a Maxis Broadband user, using a 500MB data plan on top of my mobile postpaid line. Since it’s limited and pretty expensive, I only use it on the phone and not tethering it.

The speed test sucks again, showing only 187kbps which is less than 3G speed. Another FAILED one, at least I successfully ran the speed test. Their explanation of the slowness is many laptop sharing the same connection via a router, there’s a point, but still lousy.

Which broadband provider do you use and what do you think about them?

I went around PC Fair and I saw a lot of netbook at there. I am so not interested in netbook right not because I have got my lovely Aspire One, which I bought it last year when it first release. Buying a netbook right now is a headache because there’s so many brands are offering it, it’s not like last time when netbook, the word first came to us, it’s only Asus and Acer. Later then company compete to release their netbook and this competition sucks because everyone offers almost the same thing.

I thought Dell Mini 9 has discontinued? If you are looking for Dell, Dell Mini 12 is good, but the battery life not so good.

These are the new Lenovo S10 2.

Touch screen Asus EEE PC which doesn’t fancy me. I don’t like touch tablet unless the screen is very sensitive.

The one on the far right seems good.

Have to say sorry because I didn’t really hands-on and test drive all the netbook around, I just went around, look and take photos. Anyway, I got some guide for you for choosing netbook, do take note about these:

• Battery life (at least 6 hours)
• HDD Capacity (at least 120GB)
• RAM (at least 1.5GB)
• Screen size (at least 10.1 inch)
• Weight (less than 1.2kg)
• Preferably with 3G slot built in even if you don’t have 3G data, you may have one in the future.
• Bluetooth and card reader.

After looking around, Acer and Lenovo seem to have some nice model.

Do you have anti virus software installed in your computer? I am using AVG Free Edition, and it’s free, I don’t pay for anti virus because it’s not easy to get virus into your computer if you know what you are doing with the Internet, the site you surf and your firewall security.

After all the convincing and the attractions, I am still not into buying a anti virus copy yet.

There’s 2 more popular anti virus out there, one is Karpersky which has Jackie Chan as their ambassador and you can always listen to the radio commercial on our local radio station and another is Avira with no famous super ambassador but they got have Show Girl.

They call them the Show Girl, that’s what I was being told and this is Penang, a small island and we only have 3 show girls, that sucks. We need more. Penang has demand!

PC Fair Penang is not like Tokyo Game Show where there’s a lot of booth babe, it’s so so different here.

Since Kaspersky has got no show girl, booth babe and only have a fake Jackie Chan poster on it, my (handsome) friends here helped them for promotion.

Kaspersky and Avira, which will you pick? I am serious.

Actually there’s not many freebies I can get at the PC Fair. It’s all brouchers and flyers of price list and promotion.

There’s a big broadband war going on at the PC Fair, P1 Wimax gave a very big paper bag which inside consist only a piece of their promotion flyer. The paper bag was real big and it’s good to use as I used it to dump all my flyers.

Then at Maxis Broadband booth, they gave bag too, it’s a recycle environmental friendly bag with a promotion book and a piece of flyer. They got free sweets at their booth too. Great.

Digi, Celcom and Streamyx didn’t give any bag though.

Besides bags and brouchers, HP gave me a headband with Christmas hat decoration and a fresh scent thingy which give me to hang in the car to smells good. Now I got something interesting.

Lastly, I got a lot of balloons from Maxis Broadband and P1 Wimax. =D These were useless, but fun to be popped.

Or as a car decorations. =D

Walked around the exhibition hall and found something to play and try out and that is the iRiver M3 GPS system. The design is not bad, but the screen is rather small, it will be nice if it’s widescreen. Since it’s indoor, there’s I can’t navigate around with this thing, so I place search on my house address and it works. It has preloaded maps of Malaysia and it search by cities.

What’s this different from Garmin is that it is also a media player which plays music, video, text and photo. The storage is via SD card and addition features are like local yellow page listing, 3D junction view, landmark icons and toll rates calculator.

Price at RM499 for PC Fair price, I don’t like this because the touch screen is unresponsive, I always keyed in the wrong word when searching for road and navigating around is not easy.