I started this website many years ago as I became very frustrated in finding drivers for older computers when I lived in South Africa. I found it frustrating that manufactures removed drivers from their websites when they wanted you to buy something new on offer. I started collecting them and collected 3,000 plus old drivers which I still host. The forum for this is still at the back of this website and I have left it there as it contains mainly drivers which are difficult to find. The USB driver website still runs and the UART drivers are still good. See also the Samsung Android as well. See also the free codecs website.
When I moved out to Asia I found myself frustrated again and this started oddly enough with an anti virus program called Avast!. Its a great program but it is huge being over 80MB. The internet tends to revolve around the US and the EU and I think at times people forget the other half of the world lives in Asia. There are no Asian mirrors for anything. The downloads from Thailand at best I can get 40kb/s downloading from the US. Looking back I decided that this insanity has to end as I am sure there must be at least a million people out there sitting with the same problem – slow downloads as the international bandwidth is not always that good. The front of this website was never used and I decided that if I wanted better downloads I might just as well take a server in Singapore and pull the software into the region. Now at least I can get 300kb/s and not have to make a cup of coffee while I download updates to software. Other interesting websites is a website for Thai marriage and Australian visas in Thailand. There is also a Thai Law firm with good information and a property law firm in Phuket as well as a general website on law firms in Bangkok and Family Law.
Why a Singapore Mirror
Singapore Internet Exchange (SGIX) has many members who peer in Singapore. Some of these include but not limited to the following members in Asian countries:
- PT Mora Telematika Indonesia (Indonesia)
- Microsoft (US)
- 1-Net Singapore Pte Ltd (Singapore)
- SingNet Pte Ltd (Singapore)
- Starhub Ltd (Singapore)
- Yahoo! SouthEast Asia Pte Ltd (US)
- TT dotCom Sdn Bhd (Malaysia)
- True International Gateway Company Limited (Thailand)
- China Telecom (Singapore) Pte Ltd (China)
- Globe Telecom (Philippines)
- Tata Communications International Pte Ltd (India)
The amount of bandwidth moving over the peering point in Singapore has been listed in the following graph!
User Experience:
It is at the end of the day its all about user experience. How long do they need to wait in a world with 30 minute pizza and 10 minute noodles. Lets test a download from the servers of Computer Associates and see what it takes to download a file in Hong Kong and from the US with Singapore as the hub. The speed difference is remarkable!
Download Time – Hong Kong (1,451ms) Switzerland (3,554ms) and the US in at (3,284ms)
Development:
When I looked around I decided to only add a maximum of 12 programs to each category being the most popular ones that people would download and not have to wait forever for the download to complete. Regional bandwidth and peering is on the cheap but international gets to be very pricey. Countries such as Cambodia have very limited bandwidth but all of them peer in Singapore which makes it an excellent choice to start this mirror.
So maybe in the future software distributors can give their users the choice of Asia and not just EU or US mirrors!