Technology

We’ve had our Renault Megane for 8 months now and it’s time for me to tell you what I feel about the car.

I am pretty much satisfied… :-)

The car looks very nice, has a pretty powerful engine (1.4 litres but 98 British horsepower), is very secure (with a total of 6 airbags which I don’t intend to test :-)) and is very comfortable. In fact, Christina and I have bought two car seats for Anya and Kyan and, frankly, I feel so happy driving with my wife next to me and my two kids securely fastened in the rear seats. It sure beats our previous car, a Toyota Corolla, which had deficient seats belts which precluded the use of car seats…

The engine is really smooth and the car is easy to drive (if you check the tyre pressure regularly). Fuel consumption is about 10 litres for 100 km (we tend to drive a lot in Quatre-Bornes and Reduit) which is about 31 miles per gallon for our still archaic friends. The car has an onboard computer giving (among other infomation) the instantaneous fuel consumption which helps a lot in choosing a correct driving technique.

The CD player is OK but not spectacular. I guess I should have opted for the optional Cabasse system instead… Well, next time then :-)

We’ve had one problem though that has still not been resolved. The light sensor which is used by the automatic headlights and automatic wipers subsystems is defective. We’ve sent the car at Leal for repairs (and the car is still under warranty) but they didn’t have the missing component in stock. They assured us they’ll order one from France for us and call us when it is available but they haven’t done so… yet… in spite of more than 2 months having passed :-(

I have to put some pressure on them. I’ll do that this week. Promise :-)

After more than one month without a computer at home (yep ! that’s why I was so quiet), I’m happy to announce that I am now the proud owner of a brand new AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor ruuning on a very good Abit KV8 Pro motherboard.

I’m still running x86 Gentoo Linux right now but I’ll quickly switch to AMD64 Gentoo Linux in the coming weeks.

To be frank, I was also considering an Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz (Prescott) but at the end I chose 64-bit technology as I feel that this is the future of the PC architecture. With a 64-bit OS (like AMD64 Gentoo Linux), the Athlon 64 works in 64-bit mode. In this mode, all 8 general purpose registers (like EAX and EBX) are extended to 64 bits and 8 additional 64-bit GPR come into existence (R8 to R15). Furthermore, the SSE 128-bits registers also double in number. This makes for a formidable number of registers (compared to plain old x86) for a (nearly) RISC programming paradigm.

And don’t forget that Intel has licenced this formidable AMD64 technoloy and has implemented it in some very expensive Pentium 4 and Xeon as EM64T technology.

Our beloved Renault Mégane is being serviced for the first time at Leal. Owing to the high level of humidity in Mauritius right now, some irritating faults have developed in the car’s electronic system (no automatic wipers and intermitent failure of the auto lights). There are also some other little problems that need to be looked upon (some vibration in the exhaust pipe (I think) for instance). Fortunately, we won’t have to pay anything : the car is still under warranty…

But, all for all, after 6 months, we (Christina, the kids and I) are rather satisfied with the car. It is very very comformable and it looks nice :-)