I have finally began a project I have postponed to long. I have a collection of DVDs which has become a primary target for my two little girls. The oldest of them want to watch them, and the youngest I think wants to eat/destroy them. I have moved the DVDs out of reach, but the little girls reach higher and higher ground each day.
My plan is to do 3 copies of each DVD. One full DVD copy to another 9GB or 4,5GB DVD disk. One quality copy for my server which i can stream to my PS3 and one MP4 copy for my cellphone (Nokia E52) – will come in handy when I am going on my summer holiday to Spain later this summer. The DVD copies will be stored in a large DVD folder, and the digital copies will be stored on my server. The original DVDs will be stored away safe.
Ronja – my youngest daughter – checking out the quality of Tron!
I have made a compilation of my best childhood retro memories in this 53 min long mp3-tune. I have gathered the best SID files from my favorite games and done some converting to bring you these tunes. I bet you have your own favorite tunes, but these are the ones that gives me the special retro-feeling.
The PC’s now been build and operating systems has been installed/configurated.
Building the PCs itself was quite easy, and the constructions of both were quite similar considering ports, fan connectors and such. MSI has done a great job constructing these boards, and there were no surprises. The installation of the CPUs and FANS was painless. I think the circular design of the Intel cooler (underneath the fan ofcourse – which is circular in most cases) is a nice touch, but this is ofcourse a personal meaning – and – if it doesn’t keep the temperature down – is meaningless.
The other hardware installed in addition to the mainboard is as follows :
Harddrive : Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 7200RPM 16MB cache – SATA-300
Memory : Intel setup / AMD setup – 2 x 1GB Kingston DDR2-SDRAM PC2-6400 (399MHz) / 2 x 1GB Kingston DDR3-SDRAM PC3-10700 (667MHz)
Case : Ace Clubs II with 500W powersupply
Just bought a new netbook? The reasons can be many! The manufactures sell these small laptops for different kind of use. The perfect travelling partner, the small compannion u bring along to business meetings or the small computer you can use while relaxing on the sofa. I did as many others and bought a small netbook for many good reasons, but couldn’t use it for any of them. Why? Because HP had decided to put a bloated Windows Vista on it as a operating system. The operating system looked like a shiny diamond ofcourse, but the small VIA CPU and a limited amount of memory made it impossible to use. It used ages to boot, only to boot into a desktop that was slow, the applications hanged and often crashed and I lost the motivation to use it. I put it away, using my T61 in stead – but I recently decided to bring it back “to life”
Today, unlike a few years ago, we can get alot of hardware and computing power for a small amount of money. If you choose to build a budget PC yourself, you will probably not save all that money (since complete computer systems from known brands is very cheap as well), but you can customize it to suit your needs – and at the same time build it to make future upgrades possible.
I will try to show what platform you can choose to make every dollar/euro/whatever count! I picked the cheapest amd/intel cpu and motherboard around and mounted them in two identical settings – afterwards I will benchmark them, and test them with the most used operating systems to see if they work “out-of-the-box”. Since it is years since I build a custom PC (I now mostly buy and use laptops), I will also have a look at how easy the systems is to mount.
I have gotten some questions about how I make my screencasts. I will try to show how I do it here in this article, but be warned – it could look like some sneeky advertisement for the software companies that make the software I use. Please do try to make some screencasts – it is great fun, and could be educational for yourself and others too.
We have come to the end in this article series, seeing if we could pimp this Dell Latitude D620 into a usable and perhaps into a great choice for business (and other) users today.
The pimping continues and now we are looking to improve the WLAN speed! To make it very easy to myself (and since my local computer store didn’t have an internal N-network card in store), I bought a USB N-network card from Buffalo. This version should give me the speed I wanted, and with the huge antenna supplied in the pack i knew that this would do the trick! (Pictures of the super Buffalo card in the screencast below). To test this card and the wlan setup i first thought about just copying huge files around the network, and time it. But then i found a great piece of software online : NetStress :: Network Benchmarking Tool! This software comes in two pieces, one server that I installed on my server (connected to my router with a cable and should therefor be no bottleneck), and a client that i install on the computer that is being tested, in this case my pimped D620! The benchmarking is being shown in the screencast. Well, all in all – just watch the screencast to see the improvement in speed. The setup was; my D620 using first the default Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945ABG and tested 3 meters away from the Router – no walls or such between my laptop and the router. Then afterwards using the Buffalo AirStation N-Technology High Power USB 2.0 Adapter from the same place that I tested the Intel card. Enjoy the results!
Please do watch the video in HD – it will make the text and benchmark readable:
The largest increasement in performance I have been able to upgrade to lately has been through installing a SSD-drive. I have purchased a Intel® X25-V SSD 40GB 2,5″ to replace the installed Seagate Momentus 7200.1. Would this give a greater improvement to the overall performance than installing more RAM did?
A X25-V SSD-drive is compatible to S-ATA 300 controllers, and the Dell Latitude D620 “only” got a S-ATA 150 controller – would this cripple the performance?
I just have to congratulate my favorite team Norwich City who managed to get promoted to Championship yesterday! As a Norwegian fan, I don’t get to see many games, but i have been following supporting Norwich for 15 years now – and it is days like these we can be proud to wear yellow!
Ronja – my youngest daughter – checking out the quality of Tron!
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