Air Conditioning - TechAnalyze.com

As summer dawns in Mumbai & the heat getting ever so excruciating, not to mention the increasing humidity levels that leave us sticky & sweaty, it’s that time of the year when Mumbaikars start looking for an ideal place in the wall to hook up an air conditioning unit or upgrade the already  mounted one.

I too, figured that i desperately required one for my living room & spent like an entire weekend researching on the same as I would be spending a significant sum on the same to cool my living room.

So here’s all that i gathered from my research:-

• The Best Brand?

1. Panasonic
2. O’ General
3. Hitachi
4. Samsung
5. LG
6. Voltas

• How I arrived at the above rankings:-

My ranking is based on feedback via forums, my experience with 3 brands(panasonic, hitachi & samsung) & tech specs downloaded off the respective brand’s websites. The pricing of each brand too are in line with my quality ranking index with the exception of the O’Generals being more expensive than the Panasonics.

• Brand Review:-
  • Panasonic:- ..just enetered the Indian Market a few months back. Panasonic is a japanese company which was previously known as National. Their air conditioners have some of the best features I’ve come across. They have an inverter model which can regulate the compressor just like you would a fan hence drastically cutting down on energy consumption. Another noteworthy feature is the ability to purify the air and rid it of minute dust particles or bacteria by the release of charged particles that stick to dust thus attracting it to the oppositely charged filter to be discarded. From my research, these guys had machines with the lowest energy consumption thus saving you on electricity bills.
  • O’ General:- A Japanese brand Fujitsu in colab with a Dubai based brand. There guys use the highest quality material in manufacturing process and hence are the most expensive as well. The feature set may not be as comprehensive as a Panasonic or Hitachi but if you just require the most top notch air conditioner that simply cools your room when you turn it on and are willing to shell out quite a sum for the quality parts, then O’ General is for you.
  • Hitachi:- These guys have the quietest machies on the block. I own a hitachi air conditioner in one of my rooms & the unit is pretty silent as compared to any other AC that I’ve come across. They also have a a decent feature set including technology that let’s the unit focus it’s cooling on a human in the room on detecting one.
  • Samsung & LG:- If you’re looking to buy the most economical AC with a decent set of features then the Samsungs & LGs are way to go. They have a decent feature set although they might not be as good in quality as the brands mentioned above.
  • Voltas:- Voltas is a TATA product. Cools fast and the cheapest of the lot. Although, it is nowhere in par with the other above in terms of quality, they do last & perform the job of cooling a room quite well for the price.

• Choosing AC capacity :- 1 simple rule for all Indians. I chose a 2 ton air conditioner for my room of 300 sq feet & it cools amazingly well. My unit takes not too long for cooling the entire room and yet enough time to get rid of the humidity. Indian homes have been built with no attention given to heat insulation and hence all the same.  Also, a 2 ton is equal to 24,000 BTUs(British thermal units). So make sure that although advertised a 2 ton, the unit should mention 24,000 or more BTU’s in it’s tech specs. So do the math and figure our what tonnage you would require based on my equation i.e. 300 sq feet = 2 ton.
• Energy Star rating:- The bureau of energy efficiency in India rates air conditioners based on their power consumption. Hence, look for an air conditioner with a high star rating(preferably 3-5 star) and you would save quite a bit on your electricity bill in the long run.
• My choice:- I finally choose a Panasonic 2 Ton air conditioner which I am pretty darn satisfied with. No other brand had a higher energy star rating or a wider feature set that comes with the Panasonic.

An Image of the MacBook Air and a Lenovo X300

I’ve, but recently, switched to a MacBook Pro from my Lenovo ThinkPad running Windows 7. Here are some of the reasons why I made the switch, apart from trying to satisfy my curiosity about one of the most talked of OS , OS X:

1. Beautiful & well crafted: Everything OS X is attractive. One might argue that that isn’t a strong enough argument for you to jump systems at your work place. Well, I would ask, who wouldn’t like working in an environment that is way more aesthetic? Wouldn’t efficiency improve if everything around you is way nicer?  You would definitely perform better in a well ventilated room laden with props & utilities that’s easy on your senses rather than a crowded & unorganized room. If you are surrounded by multiple 22 inch displays
   

   my setup at work

   that you interact with virtually; and for most part of your day; that becomes your surrounding. The stuff you interact with albiet virtually becomes your environment. Why was avatar such a great movie? The script was a simple ‘humans invading an alien planet’ story. However, the stuff that grabbed our attention and kept us engrossed throughout the film, unknowingly, were the breathtaking landscapes, the visual treats. Windows gets pretty close with it’s latest 7. However, using the beta for almost half a year and then switching over to Snow Leopard, I could immediately tell the difference in visual effects, fonts, typography et. al. OS X literally keeps me immersed by keeping things simply beautiful. I am a slicker for perfection when it comes to the stuff  that I innovate or help innovate. I would hence, also prefer the tools that I use, to be crafted to perfection. If you take a look at the physicality of a MAC, it indeed is designed perfectly. The MacBook Pro is moulded out of a single piece of Aluminum, precision designed to be durable and just like the OS, well crafted. You can look at it’s body and tell that it has been engineered to impress.

2. UXD: The user interface of OS X is human friendly. I prefer using that term because I believe user interfaces should be developed keeping human tendency in mind. Believe it or not, I figured that a two finger tap would probably be a right click on the ‘no button’ track pad and indeed it was. Being a windows user ever since I let go of Basic on the Atari, I was of the opinion that it would take me ages to get acquainted with OS X. I was proved wrong and could do everything I could on a windows PC within a day. The one thing I do not like about OS X is the inability to maximize windows to cover the entire screen, natively.Also, the ‘get info’ option (OS X equivalent of the properties option in windows) that gives you information on a folder or file has a huge drawback:- A ’select all’ function on a couple of folders along with a right click>properties in MS Windows would calculate the cumulative size of all. With OS X, it opens up  a ‘get info’ box for each and every file or folder that you highlighted via the ’select all’ option, thus giving you individual folder/file sizes. All in all, what aids OS X with that graphical intuitive interface, is off course, the MAC’s hardware which Apple themselves build and covered in my next point.
3. Hardware & Performance: Apple manufacturing the hardware that runs OS X gives them quite an unfair advantage over Windows. Then again, what we require is a perfect computer and the MAC does it in style. In order to avoid the unfair advantage that OS X has in terms of the hardware I felt that the perfect way to benchmark each OS’s performance was to get both of them working on the same hardware. OS X’s BootCamp came to my rescue. Yup, OS X actually comes shipped with a software that let’s you install Windows on your MAC and hence dual boot. I fished the net for a similar review and came across CNET’s benchmark charts. I ran similar tests on WIndows 7 & Snow Leopard using the iPhone’s stop watch for timing each test. The results I attained were strikingly close to CNET’s. Hence, the charts below reflect CNET’s numbers, cross verified by me. Keep in mind that we’re actually using MAC hardware to run WIndows 7 as well and hence this is more of an OS comparison rather than a complete PC v/s MAC showdown.
   
   Speed: Here’s a deep dive into Windows 7  v/s Snow Leopard’s performance benchmarks measured against time:
   

   OS X v/s Windows 7 on the race course

   
   Display & Graphics:- The MacBook Pro comes with an LED back lit display and an NVIDIA graphics card. This enables the MAC to bring to you all the visuality  offered by OS X effortlessly. We always end up fine tuning windows via turning off the visual effects and hitting the ‘Adjust for best performance’ check box. You never need to do any such thing for the MAC to perform at it’s best. The glossy screen of the MacBook Pro, although attractive doubles up as a mirror at times. It’s get’s tough viewing dark backgrounds as you can clearly see your face and everything around you reflected in the screen. Moreover, here’s a test performed using a free platform independent software called Cinebench that tests Graphics performance. Windows 7 running on the MacBook Pro surprisingly beat Snow Leopard! I think that the software rendering engine (Direct X 10) provided by Microsoft outdoes Snow Leopard’s equivalent.

   

   Image Rendering @ WIndows 7 & Snow Leopard

   
   Multitouch trackpad:- The multitouch glass trackpad on the MacBook Pro enables you to pinch, rotate, zoom in and out just like the iPhone and iPod touch. It makes available to the OS a host of shortcuts via gestures. For instance, a four finger swipe sideways brings you the ’switch application’ box that an alt+tb in windows would give you. A two finger gesture directed in any direction enables you to scroll through a page in that respective direction. There are lot more fun gestures that once you get used to, make your accessibility experience way better.
   
   Gaming: I managed to get my hands on the COD 4 Modern warfare OS X version but not the latest Modern Warfare 2. That’s another disadvantage for gamers. OS X versions of games aren’t immediately released by their makers. Hence, I’ve decided to stop looking for OS X versions of games and run them on Windows 7 via BootCamp instead. This test was performed using the game’s own benchmarking FPS engine.

   

   Game on: Windows 7 v/s Snow Leopard

   
   Battery Life:

   
   

   The MAC beats the PC in 'staying alive'

4. OS features:
   • Sleep Mode: I shut down my MacBook Pro barely once every week.  All I have to do is shut the lid while not in use or travelling between home & office. The system automatically goes into sleep mode leaving only the RAM powered and recovers your session as soon as you lift the lid.
   • Search: The spotlight search is another cool feature in OS X. Although, the Windows 7 search feature is almost equal calibre in terms of performance. However, I’ve noticed some features not available in the Windows 7 start bar search. For eg: In OS X, I can type in numbers separated by arithmetic operators and it would give me the result in real time. I would type in a word and it would give me the dictionary meaning as I type.
   • Dock & Task Bar: The new Windows 7 task bar is in par with the dock in OS X. However, the new windows 7 task bar although not as attractive as snow leopard’s dock, offers better functionality. It has a new feature wherein one can preview programs if you move your mouse over their icons in the task bar. Thereon, a mouse over the preview window magnifies the preview window to full screen. The mac enables you to do the same via a four finger swipe on the track pad. It shows you a preview of each window open and stacks them across the screen. I think both have a nice way of doing this and it aids multi tasking a great deal.
5. For Developers & Designers: Part of my work involves the development and design of reporting systems. Flash is one of the technologies I use to create the user interface for these. With the war of words between Apple & Adobe one would think that flash developers should simply stay away from MACs. However, one of the reasons I switched to a MAC was it’s ability to handle flash seamlessly. I edit flash via a web based interface which creates real time modifications to flash charts based on user input. Google’s Chrome on my ThinkPad used to crash repeatedly while committing those edits. However, the same arrangement on a MAC did not seem throw up any issue. I still do my web designing on a Windows machine via RDP to a VPS. But, this is primarily because I haven’t yet got my hands on an OS X build of Adobe’s Creative Suite. SSHing to a Linux box is natively supported by the MAC(it’s built atop of unix anyways) as well. I would recommend MAC for a web designer. Also, I somehow find that SQL query results are populated in tables way faster on a MAC than on a windows machine once the results have been fetched.
6. Applications: There is a substitute for every Windows application or software that you’re used to. However, you might have gotten so used to MS Office at work, especially Outlook, Word & Excel that iWork(Apple’s alternatives) might take some learning to get as familiar with. My colleague at work has put down a list of software alternatives for OS X to which I would add my recommendations and publish in a separate post soon.

The MacBook Pro I switched to & the ThinkPad X200 I switched from.

I am soon gonna launch a ‘quick bit’ section on my blog wherein I would publish short notes & reviews on breaking news quite regularly. So stay tuned @ techanalyze.com – the one place for reviews, from a user, sitting at an office desk, just like you