Sunday 14 February 2016

Goodbye 116 ED - Hello .... ?

It's time to change my company car, the BMW has been great and our car scheme has changed so there's a massive range of cars available, the BMW is quite expensive on the scheme when compared to others so I've made a choice to switch - then again I've often changed cars through 30+ years of company driving.

Having driven the 116 for the past four years after having cars like the Avensis and Passatt I've enjoyed the nimble handling and fun of the 116 so after looking at the new Avensis, Insignia etc. I decided I wanted to stay with a car of similar size, I also wanted a car with a 1.6 diesel as I've really enjoyed having the smaller and (in my mind) more nimble diesel - it weighs less and you feel it when driving into some corners, the previous 4 or 5 Avensis I've driven and the Passatt often felt like lumbering steam boats on some corners, the car fighting against the weight, the BMW went round bends so agile I could trim the hedge line with my wing mirrors.

I test drove the new MY16 Astra SRi 110hp 1.6 diesel for 5 days, the cars pretty much packed with gadgets as standard - Sat Nav  on the large 8 inch display, built in 4G wifi, Voice control for phone (and other functions), phone projection, Live Traffic with satellite view, cruise control and speed limiter, distance alert when following vehicles, auto braking, lane depart warning, front and rear parking sensors, a front camera also reads road signs and puts the information in the driver display - the list goes on.








I took it out around the twisting and variable roads of Matlock in Derbyshire, taking it on Motorway, Dual Carriageway and almost every combination of alternative road.

Gone is the typical front wheel drive torque steer which plagued every diesel front wheel drive I've ever had, the handling and road holding were excellent, I will say the BMW is better but it's a very small difference, driving around the twisting and constantly changing roads the Astra felt well balanced and never skipped a beat, the car is heavier than the BMW at approx 1800 kg versus 1400kg but doesn't feel heavier, the sport button puts an impressive push of power similar to the BMW and the 4 hp difference is not noticeable.

The BMW has a longer first gear and the gearing difference is noticeable for a few hours - but every car I've driven has different gear ratios, the Astra gets up to speed with hardly any effort, the 1.6 whisper diesel is silent when idling and very quiet at speed.

One thing I hated about the previous Insignia (apart from it's appalling fuel consumption) was the mindless heating controls, I could never get them right and it was great to see these had been designed by someone who actually uses a car. The controls were simple and worked great, the fans are almost silent.


The Front and Rear Parking sensors worked great, they have a bit of wrap around so you can get in the tightest of spots which was great when we visited a factory outlet at a converted mill outside Matlock.

My 116Ed settled pretty consistent at 52mpg for urban and country road driving, the Astra showed about 56-58 in the short time I had it so I would expect it to equal or exceed the BMW in economy.
On the Motorway if I cruise steady in the BMW I can achieve high 60's and the Astra looks to beat that further.

One thing that's great with the BMW is the feedback from the road, I can tell if it's dry, damp, wet, sandy etc. and get great feedback - I also feel the car balanced pretty much at my left elbow i.e. in the middle of the chassis.
The Astra steering was a little lighter, the electric power steering that almost all cars have was very light, feedback was good though, I never felt totally disconnected from the road, the BMW is better but the Astra is very close.

Seats are quite firm although I've upgraded to the AGR ergonomic front seats with however many points of adjustment they allow, I never felt that I was sliding around or uncomfortable though, I just upgraded as my allowance gives me some buying power to get some accessories.

While I'll miss the i-drive in the BMW I found the voice control and touch screen worked great so I'll just need to remember to speak my command, I can also use On-Star to ask them were something is and they can download it directly into the Sat nav or I can do this from the Android app, I can also blip the lights/horn and lock/unlock the car through the app along with other functions such as check it's location.

I opted for a few upgrades, along with the AGR seats I've chosen keyless entry and start, dual zone climate control and the parking advanced pack which includes side (blind spot) sensors with alert plus auto park, find a parking space and it will park itself.



The BMW has been a great car, agile, quick and a great all rounder, I've driven it on motorways, country roads and from one end of the country to the other, it's handled all types of roads and never skipped a beat.
My Astra comes in 14 weeks, I hope the journey will be as good, I've driven Vauxhall cars for perhaps 1/2 of my company life, I've had some that were not too good, some that were great but I felt the My16 Astra was the best I've ever driven.

Only time will tell ......


Sunday 10 January 2016

NAS4Free on Iomega NAS 200D

I got an Iomega NAS200D which is basically a 3 Disk NAS unit which normally runs Windows Storage Server 2003.
With no disks the unit has no operating system, support on the web is almost non existent and so odds of getting the restore disks are not good.

The internal workings are basically a PC - you've got 2 PCI slots, standard memory DIMMS (266MHZ) and a Celeron 2.5 GHZ.

It's got everything to run linux or similar so I thought I would get something like FreeNAS running.

FreeNAS is now 64 bit so I wanted a simpler NAS , NAS4Free runs 32 or 64 bit so I downloaded this.

The Motherboard didn't seem to be the worlds greatest booting from a USB pen drive so I burnt a CD, mounted a CD into a USB adapter and it booted OK from that.

10 minutes later and NAS4Free is installed.

Before it got to the reboot prompt it even told me what settings to use to mount the drive once I got the system booted and running stand alone.

The Nas200D has a VGA output, 1Gig network and USB front and rear so while setting I was installing it was easy as any PC to go into the BIOS, set boot order and get the NAS4Free Operating system installed.

The only issue I had which took any brain power was when I set a mount point (I'm the only user on this NAS) I set a mount point as Nas200D, forgetting that this would effectively move the mount point from /mnt to /mnt/Nas200D - so when I set my user mount point as /mnt/kevin I was effectively outside the mount point - DOH !

A quick change of the mount point (for user kevin) as /mnt/Nas200D/kevin and everythings working.
It zips along really well, the system has 2 fans so it runs really quiet - I've only one disk in at the moment (2TB) but I'm really impressed.

Effectively NAS4Free has given life to a unit that would sit there unless someone has the recovery disks - I'm very impressed with the simplicity of the software.

It has settings for everything, produces graphs, has a graphical file manager and more.