Secret Recipe

.Although Secret Recipe has established its brand name since 1997, I only knew about it when I moved to Kulim to work in a research organization in 2007. Only in 2009 I bravely hop into this cake cafe. Although Secret Recipe is more popular for its cakes rather than its food varieties, I still can see many customers have pasta or chicken recipe for their main course.

The first food I ate was Cordon Bleu Chicken, in which I had in Tesco Taiping. It got cheese stuffed in it. Interesting taste and not bad after all.

Cordon Bleu Chicken

I am not a fan of cakes to be honest. I used to hate them because some cakes taste 'so eggy' and the icings are just too sugary. The popular chocolate cakes sometimes taste 'so spongy'. But Secret Recipe had twisted my perception. Their cakes taste incredibly delicious make me feel like on top on a mountain. Sounds exaggerating but it's true.

So far I had tasted Chocolate Indulgence, Chocolate Strawberry, Chocolate Banana and Chocolate Chip Walnut. I may want to try Lemon Cheese and Hazel Cheese next time.

This is how I graded Secret Recipe:
Main Course Chicken - Taste: Good / Price: Reasonable
Cakes - Taste: Excellent / Price: Reasonable
Iced Blended Coffee Beverages - Taste: Good / Price: Expensive
Soft Drinks - Taste: Ordinary / Price: Very Expensive

Secret Recipe has been awarded 'THE BEST HALAL RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR' in 2005. Thumbs up to Secret Recipe! Halal is important for us and please maintain it. However I do hope Secret Recipe can knock down the price of their beverages to something more reasonable. What say you?

With Sudirman and my housemate cum food expert Shams at Secret Recipe Kulim
(Photo taken by Khairuldin)

My Toshiba Notebook WEI Score

.Yesterday I upgraded my RAM to 3GB (from 1.5 GB earlier). I replaced my 'extra' 512 MB RAM with the 2 GB. I wonder how's the performance like since the two RAM sticks are of different capacity (1 GB + 2 GB). Some computer experts consider this as having two different legs that will impair the computer performance. Well, is it really true?

I'm using Toshiba Notebook model Satellite M200 and this was my Windows Experience Index Score after upgrading to 3 GB RAM:

The detail of my Toshiba Notebook System (as on 20 June 2009):
Processor - Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5450 @ 1.66GHz
Memory (RAM) - 3.00 GB
Graphics - Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family
Gaming graphics - 358 MB Total available graphics memory
Primary hard disk - 91GB Free (143GB Total)
Operating System - Windows Vista (TM) Home Basic
Antivirus - Kaspersky Antivirus 7.0 (Licensed user)

Although my Base Score only improved by 0.1 from the previous 3.4, I really feel my Notebook works much faster than before. The start up and refresh rate are relatively faster. Of course the Windows Experience Index off trust me a little bit, at least it tells how my notebook performs rather than not knowing at all.

By the way, I still wonder how the dual channel rules apply and works best using two identical RAM sticks...