Finally some good news

Yesterday afternoon, my new PC was delivered..!

It didn’t take too long to remove the demo crapware that had been pre-installed, install my applications, and copy all my data files over the network.  I even remembered to de-register the old machine in iTunes before trashing it ;-) I decided to leave it on Vista 64bit for now at least, I may upgrade later in the year after it has been released, and I am sure that AV software etc is compatible…

A couple of hours this morning to get Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Outlook etc configured, and tweak all the icons, menu’s etc to match my old machine, and I am now up and running…  there are 8 cores showing in the CPU monitor – Cool!

I will leave my old PC for a day or two to ensure that I forgot nothing, and then wipe it and re-load ready for Amy.

Ouch! (Updated)

Not just once, but twice!!

Took the Bandit in for it’s annual service and MOT this morning, had call from shop this afternoon – New exhaust and front tyre required to get thro’ MOT. 
Seems a ‘road legal’ Scorpion muffler at £190 is the most ‘Cost Effective’ replacement, add on the £117 for the front tyre, the cost of the service and the MOT… well not expecting any change out of £500 :-(

Update: Once they got the downpipes off today, they found that those too were scrap!!  So on top of everything else I now need a new set of downpipes - £300!!  At least they will be Stainless Steel rather than the originals (Chrome plated Mild Steel)

Between leaving the bike, and getting the bad news, I went for an eye-test.  It’s been almost two years since the last one, and I am finding my current glasses a little “underpowered” now, either the glasses are ‘wearing out’ or my eyes are!
No surprises for guessing, new specs required £230 for bi-focals, but I do get a *FREE* pair of prescription sun glasses!

1 step closer

I received an email today from PCSpecialist, my new machine has been built, and is now entering the testing and quality control phase ;-)

Should be here late this week, early next with a bit of luck.  Still undecided if I should put Win7 RC on there… I have 32 and 64 bit versions, but am a little concerned about anti virus compatibility at the moment.  Looks like most of the major Av vendors are adopting an attitude waiting till final release to confirm what will and won’t work, although interestingly, the forums for Norton 2009 suggest that it is fully working on Win 7 64 bit, and that it’s only the 32 bit version that has issues!

Backups

Now that the NAS device is on the network, and contains a set of Documents, Music, Pictures and Video’s with over 700GB still fee, I have freed up 120GB on my 2nd hard drive.

Call me paranoid, but I am still keeping an occasional backup of Music and Pictures on this drive in addition to the network backup…  Well, both the laptop and Amy’s computer have full access to the backup, so I can’t be 100% sure that they won’t delete something accidentally…

But then just to confirm my paranoia, I have just signed up for a 15 day free trial with Carbonite, who offer “unlimited online storage” for $49.95 per year, which even with the terrible exchange rate at present is only 67p  per week.  The initial backup may actually take most (or more!) of the 15 day trial to complete: My ‘user’ folder is 192 GB, well it will certainly test their “unlimited” claim ;-)

NAS Drive – Soon!

Had an e-mail this morning… The NAS drive is back in stock and was despatched Friday.

It is currently in the DHL depot at Sandwell, that's only about 5 miles from home, so with luck should be delivered Monday ;-) Just hope I'm actually in when they try!!

OK, back to XP…

Had to concede defeat on the laptop running Windows 7.  Don’t get me wrong, loved the OS, but just could not handle to pathetic video performance.

Even games like Solitaire were unplayable, utube vids were 1 fps (or slower) etc.  in short the machine was close to unusable in any meaningful definition.  Problem is the video hardware was obsolete even before Vista came out, and no  drivers have been produced for anything newer than XP, and they failed to load correctly in Vista.

Re-formatted the HDD last night and reloaded the original ACER factory build from the recovery CD’s.  Tonight I need to connect it to the interweb and download a shed full of updates, but I think I will download the ‘offline’ XP SP3 to the thumb drive, and at least install that first…!

Another Casualty

Seems that my external 250GB external USB drive got damaged too with the Power supply/rebooting type issues recently.

Ah well, it’s an excuse to get rid of it – it was just too bloody noisy in normal use to leave switched on/connect all the time, and did have an habit of not coming back on line if the PC had been suspended for any length of time.

So today I have ordered a LaCie 1TB NAS from the BT shop, for about £120 (delivered) I get a 1TB store, with a Gigabit Ethernet connection.  Should be enough to hold everything several times over… for now at least.  Not in stock at present, so that should be about 3 or 4 weeks.

£1.12

The cost per day in fuel to travel to work and back on the Bandit 650 is approximately £1.12.

The interesting fact that can be extracted from this snippet of information is that with the heated grips on, I get about 20 miles less to  a tank of fuel, which mean that the cost of running the grips in cold weather is approximately 14p per day.

New Monitor

Today I took delivery of my new BenQ G2400WT 24” Wide screen monitor (1920x1200) from CCL, and it is completely magnificent!

My ‘old’ 20” Monitor is now in Amy’s room, and here 19” CRT Monitor with the dodgy red gun has been taken to the local tip.

Basically, since the PC is running so much better now after new MotherBoard, HDD and Power Supply I have decided to hold off on the new PC till much later in the year, so now seemed like a good time to get a new monitor.

Back Working (Again!)

I am getting much quicker at this re-installing Windows lark, from start to working system , all common utilities loaded, all major apps loaded, and probably 90% of all my normal ‘tweaks’ completed – a fraction under 5 hours!

Lets see how long it runs for this time!

And so it goes on…

Got a 570Watt supply from Maplin’s this morning, 1p under £40, but with all the connections I need – 4xSATA 4xAUX etc.

Took it home and fitted it, and that’s when I found that the HDD was not even spinning up!  Took it out for a look, and saw that some component on the controller card was blown out!!

A trip to PCWorld at Birmingham, resulted in an Hitachi 750GB SATA drive (£90!!!!), It is bloody fast tho’  Copying 81GB of MP3’s across from the backup drive was an impressive 45 to 51 MB/Sec, the previous Samsung drive was 28 to 32 MB/Sec, and I had been impressed with that!

Ah well, lets re-install windows again :-(

Woot!

Motherboard arrived (well was collected from CityLink) last night, and after a hour of intensive surgery, the machine powered back up.

Vista 64 is running quite well on one of the partitions at the moment, and a ‘Windows Rating’ test show that my memory speed has increased from 4.2 to 5.3 for the same DIMMS!  Looks like the new Mobo is an improvement!

The Vista install took from about 22:00 to 00:00 last night, but most of the ‘Utility’ class apps are now on, and the first two waves of windows updates.  Bit more ‘Tweaking’ to do, and then get down to installing  Office, Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

Argggggggh!

The Desktop PC is pretty well toast again at the moment. It keeps locking up whilst in use, reboot by itself, and losing contact with the Disks... Looks like the 500 GB drive may not have died after all!

Spoke to CCL Tech suppprt line yesterday, and we came to the conclusion that the Motherboard is faulty. Bearing in mind I want a complete new machine soon, I really don't want to spend too much cash on getting this one working again, but it does need to be a worker, so that Amy can have it.

Turns out that for £25+VAT I can get a suitable replacment Abit MoBo, that will support up to 2.4 GHz CPUs, only support 4GB RAM (DDR2 533 max), only take two SATA drives, only has 1 ATA port - but guess what? That is exactly what I need to fit back onto it!

Ordered it yesterday, should be delivered on Monday, so yet another Windows rebuild to look forward to next week.

Oh Bugger!

Yesterday I finally conceded defeat, the 240GB HDD I have been using with Vista 64 is just too small and too slow.  I need to replace the drive.

I purchased a 750 GB Samsung drive (7200 rpm, 32 MB Buffer, SATA II) for £65 from PC World, and when I got home installed it into the PC.

I then downloaded a trial copy of Acronis True Image 2009, as it is supposed to be a fully working version for 14 days, and has the capability to ‘clone drives’

After I installed it, a reboot was required – BSOD Boot Loop!!

After a lot of messing about, I have started re-installing Vista (32 bit this time) on the new drive.  Last night was a late one, but I am almost back up and working, OS updates, Office, most of the Music, Pictures and Video files are back over.

Still on the ToDo list:

Photoshop & Dreamweaver, restore ‘My Documents’ and configure Outlook.

No doublt I will find other stuff to put back on over the next few days, but for now it’s looking pretty useful.

Windows 7 Beta

I have downloaded the .iso image, but given the recent problems with my desktop PC, I am not prepared to risk it on there, and not too sure if it will work properly on the laptop – Vista fails to load working drivers for the wireless!

May have to wait till I get new PC and I can try it on the newly designated “old PC” ;-)

Interesting software…

If you have a Canon compact digital camera.

Ever waned to be able to save in RAW format from your compact, or have a live histogram?  What about exposures up to 64 seconds, flash sync at 1/60000th or exposure bracketing !  Then you need “Canon Hack Development Kit”  You can even script your camera to fire on motion detection!!

Check http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK for full details, of features and supported models.

Unfortunately, my “IXUS 85 is” isn’t supported yet, but development is proceeding apace, and there should be a functional port within a week or two.

Getting there

As the week progressed, call volumes have gently increased, and the boredom level has dropped and the temperatures, whilst still low are now at least higher than zero.

The one thing that has not got better is the traffic.  The road works on the Hagley Road have re-opened after their xmas break, and it is complete chaos again.  Even on the bike, the ride home is terrible, and a good 5 minutes longer than ‘Normal’, I just hope they finish soon.

Today is my first ‘Long Weekend’ of the year, and due to the remaining frost, the golf course is mostly closed, and it is forecast heavy rain for Monday!

Amy’s new handset arrived on Tuesday evening, and I requested the old number be ported, that is due for completion today, but the 3 PAYG SIMS that were supposed to be sent, were in fact SIM only Monthly contracts.  I had to call Orange and cancel those, and an now awaiting delivery of the re-ordered PAYG SIMS.

CPU Update

Following on from my recent investigations, I realised that there was in fact a 3.33 GHz Dual Core CPU, the E8600.  I checked the benchmarking details of this item against the E8500 (winner according to the previous post), and found that it gave an average of 40% improvement over my current CPU compared to the 35% for the E8500. So am I going for the E8600?  Probably not!

I added some cost data to my little spreadsheet, and came to the following conclusions for cost per % of improvement:

E8500 - £4.54
E8600 - £5.25
Q9550- £10.05
i7-920 - £16.15

So at £220 rather than £164 (CCL Computers today's date) it is not a cost effective option, and the extra 5% would equate to a 4 second saving on a 1’40 task!!

New PC: Q1 CPU

Still struggling over the spec for new PC, Current dilemma:

First question AMD or Intel?  I am happy with Intel, and it seems that Photoshop CS4 is written to take advantage of the Intel instruction set, so… Intel it is>

Next Question:
Do I Spend £180 and get a 3.1GHz dual core (E8500) or for an extra £100 get a 2.8 GHz quad core (Q9550)? 

Moving up the quad core speed list the 3.0 GHz Q9650 is about £460 – way too expensive.

The Core i7 CPU’s are the last option, with the 2.66 GHz version (i7-920) being available for about £240 (faster versions jump to £490/£880 for 2.9/3.2 GHz)

The article on Tom’s Hardware (CPU Charts Q3 2008)confirms that the dual core at a 3.1 GHz would be on average 35% faster than my current processor across a range of real world applications*, moving to a 2.8GH Quad core would, in most cases only give me a 20% improvement, and the 2.6 GHz i7 would be even worse at a mere 11%.

This is a only true, however, for those apps which currently are not written to take advantage of multiple cores (i.e. almost everything!)  For the select few that are (WinRAR 3.8, AVG antivirus) the improvement for the Quad Core averages 90%, and for the i7 130%!!

If software writers continue to be slow on the uptake of this multi-core technology, I think the 3.1 GH Dual core is the way to go.

* The benchmarks considered here were: 
Applying multiple filters to a large image in Photoshop CS3
Zipping up a large number of files with Winzip 11
Ripping a DVD in iTunes
Converting a large document in Acrobat Pro 9
Running a demo in Unreal Tournament 3.0
Scanning a collection of files with Grisoft AVG 8
Zipping a large number of files with WinRAR 3.8

Only the last two apps are ‘Multi-Core Optimised’

Just about back…

to where I was before the hard disc failure.

I have, after many hours of downloading, and updating, patching, installing etc. managed to restore my PC back to a fully working condition, with no significant loss of data.

All I know that is missing is three weeks worth of e-mails, and none of them were of great significance.

The biggest pain, was that just before losing the drive, I had spent about 10 hours tidying up the “My Documents” and “My Pictures” folders.  After restoration, everything was a mess again, and it just seems much more like hard work when you have to do the same job for the second time!

The upshot of the last rationalisation, is that the free space on the 250 GB drive is now near 50GB, so it will last till I change the PC now.  Additional benefit of ‘zip’ or ‘rar’ ing several large but not well used folders is that the number of files on the drive has decreased by several 10’s of thousands, which makes backups (yes I am backing up every day at present) and defraging much quicker.