Does it impress?
Oh yes! After almost blowing £1,100 on a better specification XPS laptop, which was sadly from the older XPS range I ended up being talked in to buying the M1530, the bigger brother of one of the best laptops from 2007, the M1330. Despite having a 2-3 week delivery delay on their laptops they managed to get it to be extremely fast. I ordered the thing online on the 3rd January, and it arrived on the 7th of January.
I have spent the past few days jotting down notes and have come up with my first review of 2008! Top dogs!
How neat is this? The pictures tell the whole story anyway.
This is the SATA HDD Stage Rack, which is a Mac and PC compatible device that connects via USB 2.0. Simply plugging in a hard drive ala Atari 2600 Cart style will allow the drive to show up on your computer. There are two versions - the 2.5" for notebook drives and 3.5" versions for standard desktop hard drives. The stage rack sadly does require an external power connection, however I know little else right now. It also has a glowing bl00 light - these things are important in any device! I can only find this device on Amazon US so far, but I want one!
My ‘Junk Cupboard’ is packed with old hard drives, mostly of the IDE variety sadly so I’m hoping that an IDE version gets released in future. The button at the front looks like an eject button to ‘pop’ release the drive safely too. Hopefully these devices won’t be too costly.
Bit large innit?
Blimey! My current stunner of a PC case, the legendary Coolermaster 201c wasn’t large enough to accommodate the needs of my new PC rig. The sheer size of my Ninja Scythe CPU heatsink made me realise that it’s time to upgrade the case. After weeks of hunting for a decent one under £150, I had narrowed down my decision to two cases. The Antec Nine Hundred gamer case (approx £100), or the Coolermaster Stacker 830 (£170). The latter is regarded as one of the largest most spacious cases you can buy. As I’m an old school Coolermaster fan, even though their products aren’t as good as they used to be, I purchased the Stacker.
It arrived last week. The box was so large that my local City Link delivery driver now hates my guts. I was at work when it arrived, but my dad sniggered like hell while he watched the guy attempt to remove the gigantic box from his van. I could have passed out upon seeing the size of the box when I got home. Upon taking the thing out, one thing was clear - It’s a bit bloody BIG.
Having space for 9×5.25" drives, and up to 9×120mm fans, this thing is utterly massive. So big that it barely fits under my desk, and I really struggled to get any good photos of it. Tried to take a photo of it while it was stood upright on my bed, but it just toppled over! There’s so much space in there, that you could fit a small moon in there and that’s with my components present! So far I have 5×120mm fans in there, and the system is totally silent, miles more than my last rig in my Coolermaster 201 case. It’s so quiet that at night the only sound I can hear, is the low frequency hum from my sub woofers.
So far I have…
- Moved this blog to a new host
- Rebuilt my PC in to a wee overclocked beastie
- Installed Wordpress 2.1 & K2
- Installed Windows Vista Home Premium
- Got myself one of those girlfriend things (not the inflatable type)
- Cried as Lotus Organiser 6.1 wouldn’t work (does now)
To say I’ve been busy is an understatement. Given the circumstances I think I’ve managed to juggle events in my career and my social life rather well! Winter over here in the UK isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. I had been expecting a ton of snow to drop between Jan and March 2007, so far we’ve seen one full night of snow, which saw the UK grind to a halt as about a foot of snow hit London alone. Man, when I was a child the snow was so deep that they’d be waist height to me, and things were fine. Obviously the UK wasn’t as crowded back then, but you get what I mean. Right now as I type this, it’s sunny out there with a chilly ice cold wind. Even my father’s flowers have started blooming - they’re confused too!
I’ve had a few emails asking if I’ve ‘Died yet?’, so no I haven’t done so. I’ve just been rather busy that’s all. I’m currently doing a small (well it was meant to be) write up on Windows Vista’s key features that newbie’s can expect to encounter. Now I was meant to finish it this weekend but half of it has been cleverly left at work! Lastly, I met the lovely Deena at my local gym two weeks ago and we’ve been dating since then 
Valentine’s is coming up people…get those Tesco’s cards on standby…
I’ve just added two reviews to the reviews section. Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360, and the Western Digital 320GB My Book External Hard Drive, which I recently purchased to backup all my data onto.
I’ve been feeling quite poor recently, after the New Years celebrations. I’ve felt unfit, and unwell as a result too, so I really need to get back into shape, not that I went on a mad drinking/eating spree during the festivities, but I did stop going to the gym for a solid 3 weeks and I can now feel the effects of that decision. This unwell feeling isn’t helped by the fact that my Laptop has died, while I awaited parts for my new PC (below). I was meant to use the lappy to write reviews while my main PC was out of action, but that plan backfired. So after spending well over £1100 on components for a new PC, I’ve not got to get the lappy repaired too. Great 
More Power!
I’ll possibly be away for a few days while I do a total rebuild on this PC, which is an ancient beastie. To be honest I don’t need to build a new rig, but given that Windows Vista arrives towards the end of January, I do want my machine to handle this bloated behemoth of an Operating System (OS). I’d roughly guess that about 90% of PC users who want this OS will end up doing a rebuild of their machine.
It’s slightly absurd that an OS should require so much resource power just to bloody run, but that’s just typical Microsoft. I’m going to stick to XP for as long as I can though, because I’ll be buggered if I’m paying £220 for the Home Premium Edition, I’ll wait for a price drop. I’m not too clear on the upgrade version yet as the info is a bit clouded. So this Friday 5th, my new PC parts will arrive along with XP Media Center 2005. Hopefully everything should go well, because I’ve got a heap of reviews needing checking.
This new rig will be mainly built for non gaming use, as I have the Xbox 360 for games now. So I’ll be doing video encoding, general office use, blogging/php work, photo editing and multimedia on this new rig for the most part. One half of me doesn’t want to spend the best part of £750 on new parts, given that this machine still does and can easily do anything that I normally throw at it. Hell XP flies on this. However it struggled with the Windows Vista Beta, although it was a beta. See ya soon!
So I’ll be moving from:
Abit NF7-S Motherboard
Barton 2500+ (running overclocked at 2.4ghz)
1.5GB of DDR3200 Ram
3×160GB Hitachi Deskstar Hard drives
Creative Audigy 2 Sound
Nvidia 6800GT (running dual 19" Widescreens)
Geforce 2MX PCI (running one 20.1" Widescreen)
To:
Abit AW9D-Max Motherboard (its got blue leds!)
Intel Core 2 DUO 2.4ghz (will be overclocked)
2GB of DDR2 PC6400 Ram (further 1gb to be added later)
1×160GB Hitachi Deskstar (got enough external storage as it is)
Creative Audigy 2 Sound (I’ll stick with this for now)
Gainward Geforce 7900GT (to drive my dual 19" screens)
