Joined: 15 Jun 2008
Posts: 1391
Location: UK
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Warning: Medium Length post.
[geek mode]
You may have noticed I've been a bit quiet of late: Basically, it's because I finally decided to pay up and get a whole new PC. The old one's southbridghe (drive controller) had failed because I was asking it to handle too much data too often (6 SATA-RAID drives running 24/7), so it was inevitable really.
Here's a little screenshot of half of my desktop:
http://i311.photobucket.com/albums/kk460/Heeler_2008/left-screen.jpg
Since I'm running twin widescreen monitors I figure I'd just show one half, after all, the other one is pretty much empty, although useful for displaying panoramics, and if I showed them both I guess it might make it difficult to view the image, plus difficult to host, since most of the free hosting sites set size limits.
That screen shot is from one 28inch true LCD - native resolution 1920x1200 - full 1080p / HD capabillity etc.
The reason that kept me busy for so long was that I am very demanding when it comes to my PC. I tend to need it a lot, for both work and leisure. I thought about buying a pre-made PC but I'm just too demanding to go with that option, so I researched all the components and hand-built it myself - just the fine-tuning to do, which is why I got Everest Ultimate Engineer edition running showing all the temps in the Systray. Ignore the pixelated icons - they're just security stuff I have to run for work.
As you can tell that box is running XP (Pro Corporate SP3 32bit), which can handle up to four processor cores. Once they bring out chips with more than 4 cores I guess I'll have to upgrade OS but for now that's the OS for me. I prefer it to Vista since it has a smaller footprint, but when the bugs are ironed out of Windows 7 I might upgrade. I know there's alternatives to micro$oft, but for the work I do most of the programs need windows, so if I need other OS's I just run them in virtual machines.
The reason one of the hard drives is at 15 degrees C isn't a misread - that's about the temperature of the air going into the case: the room of my house I keep my main computers in is air conditioned to keep it below 13c. Like computers, I like the cold anyway, so that's fine by me.  But yeah our electricity bill is like $600 a month LOL - can't have everything. 
So yeah, that 15c hard disk is my system disk - I went with a WD VelociRaptor for that, due to their lightning fast ~4ms access times. I considered those 15krpm SAS drives but decided it was a too many times more expensive and not really worth it considering the small increase in speed.
The other two drives are large scale storage, for my digital media collection, you know, tv, dvds etc. I don't like having to find and change a disk when I'm watching a TV series, so I keep all my films and all my TV series on local disks for instant access - I considered external storage, like NAS, but for true speed I just prefer to have local SATA-raid arrays.
But yep, I'm pretty much living in geek-world at the moment, with bits of computer hardware and cooling kit all over the place, and when I get into this mode I tend to spend more time inside the PC tinkering with cables and cooling than actually using the thing, and that's why I haven't been online much.
But yeah the new rig is pretty much finished now. So hopefully when I catch up with all the other stuff I've been neglecting I'll be able to get back to spam... i mean posting here on HC.
Tata for now. |
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 "The best part of falling is getting back up again" |
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Joined: 04 Dec 2007
Posts: 1067
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
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