Archos for Networkers

Last year I read Mr. Himawan's post about Zen for CCIE, and I think it's very interesting to have Internetwork Expert Advanced Technology class-on-demand in a portable media player such that.
But I'm still far enough to pursue CCIE. I'm now in a Routing & Switching track, there are lot of things that I should learn before I start to pursue CCIE. Therefore I take CCNA, JNCIA-ER, JNCIS-ER and now I'm pursuing CCNP.




I see that CCNP has 4 exams to pass, and I think I should spent more time to learn the material starting from BSCI. Several months ago, I download all materials for CCNP, including ciscopress.com books, CCNP Video Mentor, CBT Nuggets, Trainsignals, etc. Thanks to Mr. Taufan for downloading all the materials for me since I don't have extra bandwith to download those things. For BSCI actually I have the BSCI Self-Study Guide book to read that I bought from Mr. Ricky, but that book is very thick and I don't have space to put it on my Dark Army Nike C.O.R.E. Audio Backpack.

So, I go to Mr. Himawan's blog again to read the review about the Zen. I searched in Gadtorade's mailing list, maybe there is a person who sell the thing. I found one but I cannot afford the price. But someone post about Archos Portable Media Player and I wonder how's that compared to the Creative Zen.

I wanted to buy the Creative Zen W since it has wide screen and big capacity. But, I don't have much money to afford that. Then I bought the Archos 405 from a webstore Indonesian Amazon. They give me special price for it, and they can deliver it to my place directly with good price for me.



Compared to Archos, Zen is wider.
But Archos has a built in PDF Viewer in it, WOW!
I can put my ebooks in it. The good things in the PDF Viewer is that the hyperlinks inside the PDF is working!
So I just go to the table of contents and choose which one I would like to read with one click away.
But it would be better if the PDF Viewer has PDA's like reflow feature and can views in portrait or landscape mode.



Okay, the next thing is the CCNP Video Mentor to put. It looks great! :D











I like to watch DVD movies or series such as Prison Break also , but I don't have time to watch them. If I have spare time, I rather playing with dynamips, read ebooks, or watch video tutorials. But sometime I have that I want to watch the DVDs like in a bus, a car trip, or somewhere. Its impossible to watch DVDs from my laptop since it uses external DVD ROM and has smalll size of Hard Disk. Thanks to Simpledivx that comes together with the Archos' CD. Now I can put DVD movies in my Archos.


The Archos 605 and Archos 705 that have up to 160GB internal memory are better than mine since its only has 2GB internal memory, but I can't afford to buy those things since they're over my budget. So, the next thing for me is to buy a big SD Card to store other videos like the Internetwork Expert Class-On-Demand Video later. Hope I can spare my money to buy it later.