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Connie's Overclocked Machine Stats
Well, I finally got Alex’s new machine up and running. Thought I’d give overclocking a serious try to see how things are. Boy there are certainly some risks in it, but it is interesting to see how flexible folks have made these things. Here’s the machine today. The main gotcha is that it was incredibly…
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Ultimate Boot CD
Ultimate Boot CD. Wow, what a great idea, here is a CD image of a bootable CD with everything on it. I tried to use Bart’s Boot CD stuff, but the script fails mysteriously. This is a better idea since it has everything on it already. A 56MB image.
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Blowing up a Floppy Drive
Been putting together Connie’s new computer. First time I’ve ever had a machine not power up and also the first time I’ve smelled burning. Not good. Fortunately, didn’t burn out the whole motherboard. Whenever you build a new computer, make sure your hand is next to the power off switch. So, here is what I…
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Mac Flac and Bit Torrent
Here are some more tools that I’ve been using: * “Mac Flac”:http://www.danrules.com/macflac/. Flac is a lossless compression format for compressing CDs. * “Bit Torrent”:http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/. This is a pretty cool file download system. The client is a little strange as it is the usual obscure user interface. * “Experimental”:http://ei.kefro.st/projects/btclient/. When you download experimental, you get a…
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Connie's Work Machine
OK, Connie has $2,200 to buy a machine and printer for work. That’s the standard budget over at Harberview. They are standardized on Dell Optiplex desktops and Latitude notebooks. Interesting to see Windows 2000, not XP is part of the standard too. I’m not used to paying so much for hardware, so this is a…
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My Onkyo TX-DS989 Dies and what are all these formats anyway?
Onkyo Upgrades TX-DS989 Future-Proof Receiver. I’ve had this Audio-video receiver for about two years now. Blew out an amplifier and also part of the digital processing section by crossing some speaker wires in the back (yes, Virginia, it was dumb to have a bunch of stripped wires back there, I’ve fixed that now). In any…
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nVidia GeForce 5900 SE
“Firing Squad”:http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/evga_e-geforce_fx_5900_xt_review/, “Hot Hardware”:http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/S&V/gffx_5900xt.shtml, “Guru-3D”:http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/112/ and “Tech-Report”:http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2003q4/geforcefx-5900xt/index.x?pg=1 have all reviewed this board (called the GeForce 5900 SE) and the chipset (called the 5900 XT). Go figure this naming convention stuff. You can get it for about $185 right now online. It is basically a high end GeForce 5900 with slower memory (2.8ns vs. 2.2ns) and…
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Easy way to price video cards and CPUs
Pricewatch Video Cards. Here’s an easy way to see the prices of video cards at a glance. Pricewatch publishes them all on one page. The pricegrabber merchants seem higher end (fewer small stores), but this is a great way to get a feel for market pricing. “Pricewatch on CPUs”:http://www.pricewatch.com/menus/m3.htm. The same is true for CPU…
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Build Your Own PC Message Forums – shuttle sb61g2 memory problems?
Build Your Own PC Message Forums – shuttle sb61g2 memory problems?. I tried to overclock my Dad’s machine and everything fell apart! Got all kinds of random crashes. Not just blue screen of deaths, but hard crashes. Also unrealiable reads and installs. Tried a bunch of things and finally detuned the memory and this seemed…
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ATI and nVidia Roadmaps
“Endian roadmap”:http://endian.net/roadmap.asp. One of the worst things to do is to buy a new card or other piece of hardware and then discover there was a big price cut or a new model due the next week. Endian has a whole cut of news just basd on new roadmaps. Super useful to check. So for…