Tuesday December 30
 
01:47
 
Serious Or Fun?

I’ve been toying with the idea of building my own PC recently, and here’s the dialema. Do I just build something cheap and useful for fun, or do I go straight for the power system, or do I go for something inbetween?

I’m very tempted by the power system. I have over 200,000 yen refunded from my iMac, so I have the dosh. For about 110,000 yen I could have a core i7 with 6GB of DDR3 memory and 1GB SATA0 main disk (ie 2 x 500GB). That would be a stonkingly fast system.

Trouble is, I’ve been monitoring my CPU usage, and apart from when I’m running Lightroom I rarely get close to peaking my 2Ghz dual core 3GB ram Intel (Windows seems so much better at handling memory and CPU than the Mac was – I would peak out consistently on Os X running iTunes, Virtual PC, and Lightroom, and those seem find together under Windows).

So I don’t NEED an i7. I might want one, but I certainly don’t need it.

At the other end of the spectrum, I can get a AMD Athlon 64 X2 motherboard with HDMI and HD support for around 8000 yen. A 2.6Ghz-ish dual core Athlon 64 would be about the same price. All in – reusing my IDE disks – I’ve have a dual core, 4GB ram, HDMI system for about 36,000 yen. The great thing about this setup is that it gives me experience building a kit without worrying about whether I blow something, and then I can expand it later with and extra 4GB memory and SATA when I need to. I can even replace the processor with a quad-core once the prices drop.

The bad point, though, is that I would almost certainly throw it away at some point.

In the middle we have a Q6600 setup – around 70,000yen. It has the best of both worlds – eg. cheap enough to not worry about screwing something up (would be an arse if I bought the wrong memory modules for the i7 system, for example) – but also the worst of both worlds (I would still want something better).

My thoughts at the moment are to just build the cheapo system. At 36,000 yen, it’s almost throwaway month – it will give me experience building a kit, it will be faster than my current laptop, and by the time I have finished playing with it, hopefully DDR3 and i7 CPU/motherboard prices will have dropped by 36,000 yen!

Hmm, have I made my decision already? Build something cheap and useful for fun?

Monday December 29
 
10:11
 
Hello Vista!

I’ve not been Vista’s greatest fan, but after installing it yesterday, I’ve changed my mind completely. Installing Vista has completely cured my laptop fuzzy VGA output (see comment here).

This is more likely due to drivers than anything else. My suspicion is that due to Aero’s requirements (needing a Graphics score of 3.0) and the class action about what “Vista Capable” really means, Intel and Microsoft have been forced to pay attention to driver implementation for common chipsets, hence the better overally quality. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the initial GMA950 (945GM) driver upon installing Vista rated 2.2 and the later driver installed during Windows Update meets the exact minimum for Aero.

The other problems with Vista may still be there – I’ve yet to try out network shares – but this one change alone makes Vista a keeper for me. I’m actually astounded the VGA output is now clear – I expected the issue to be with the power of my laptop’s analog D-SUB output rather than a driver issue (I’m sure my XP drivers are up to date).

Why did I install Vista? Two reasons. Firstly, everyone I know now that asks me for PC help has Vista. Secondly, if I do build my own PC, it will have 64-bit Vista to take advantage of 4/8Gb memory.

I am now completely Macless. Due to limited disk space, I had to replace the Macos X installation on my LG with Vista. I’m now Windows only. I should probably have tried the VGA output from Mac before scrubbing the installation – don’t know why I didn’t think about doing that.

Sunday December 21
 
09:21
 
Mac No More

I no longer have a Mac. Correction: I no longer have an official Mac.

My iMac was suffering from a creature inside. No problem, Apple said, we’ll replace the LCD. That was two weeks ago. 

This week I went down to pick up the repaired machine. Last time Apple touched the inside of my iMac, I was left with big wipe marks inside the glass. This time, no wipe marks but dust. Dust between the LCD and glass, which, obviously, I couldn’t wipe away. Reluctantly – as if I should accept dust there – the “Genius” took the machine away for the dust to be cleaned off.

Twenty minutes later and the iMac was back. Initial impressions were not good – the front of the screen was covered by a layer of dust and little bits of packing foam. This time not only was there dust inside the screen, but wipe marks inside the glass. Exactly the same streaks that I found last time.

An hour later and the iMac was back again. No streaks but dust and what looked to be a small hair.

“We’re never going to get it perfectly right,” I was told, “Did you buy it at this store?”

And without me asking for it, I was promptly offered a full refund. Quite frankly, I was astonished – the machine is 6 months old – but since this is the 6th time I’ve lugged my iMac back and forward from Apple, and since every time my iMac is repaired it seems to come back with something inside the LCD, I decided to accept. Why they open the iMacs in a dusty environment – which they clearly do from the second time the machines was brought back – I don’t know. 

So that’s it. I’m now Macless – or at least, officially Macless since my LG still runs MacOSX. In honestly, I was getting to the stage where I was wondering why I was using Mac anyway – nothing I was running was Mac specific, and it was a hassle to backup to a network drive.

My Lightroom library opened on Windows no problem (just had to open the Mac library and then tell Lightroom the location of my top level photo folders). iTunes was trouble as usual, but after going through each of my Korean songs one by one – about 1000 of them – it was working again.

Now I’m looking at doing the same as Eyal – building my own machine. It wont run Macos, but it might run 64-bit Vista with 8GB of memory, Quad core (I do a lot of multitasking), and RAID0 on SATA disks for performance. Half the price of the iMac, double the performance.

Monday December 8
 
16:51
 
The Ring

I noticed some marks on my iMac LCD a few days ago – like a hand pushing from the inside to get out. Try as I might, I couldn’t get it to appear in any photos.

I don’t remember watching any borrowed DVDs recently.

Friday December 5
 
17:20
 
FAIL

From failblog.org.