See, buying that X2 CPU did it!

AMD up 6.5 percent today! Woo hoo!

Stocks climb on bullish AMD comments - Yahoo! News

My new quiet computer

I finally decided to get a new computer as the racket from my oldest Shuttle system was getting much too annoying. That system will go downstairs and become a MythTV front end for watching things on the treadmill, bumping off the five-year-old system that was my first DIY computer. All of the pieces for the new system finally came in, so here's some quick notes about what I got, what I liked, and how it turned out. This post is obviously for the nerds out there.

My two goals were (1) quiet (see above) and (2) dual-core. I also wanted to prop up AMD's stock price, so I wanted to go with an AMD CPU. My parts lineup was as follows:

* AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
* Scythe MINE CPU Cooler
* Gigabyte K8U motherboard
* 1GB 400MHz DDR RAM
* Antec Sonata II Quiet ATX Mini-Tower case
* Additional 120mm Zalman Silent Fan
* AOpen 16X DVD/CD burner
* Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA hard drive
* EVGA GeForce 6200 AGP 8x video card

Got all my parts from the fine folk at Directron.com, with the exception of the video card, which I got from newegg.com. All told the price tag was just over $700.

The most notable part was definitely the Scythe CPU cooler. Check out this online review to see how big the sucker is. I was afraid it wouldn't stay on, but it did. It had been a while since I'd done the Arctic Silver thermal paste routine, but I didn't do too badly... only got a little bit where it ought not be.

Once the cooler was on the CPU, the next trick was getting it into the Antec case. The Antec includes an internal pipe system, ostensibly to cool off the internal components with the rear 120mm fan. There was no way the plastic pipe would fit with the Scythe Mine, so off it went. The video card is fanless, so it'll just have to make do with the cooling from the fans (the stock Antec fan, an additional Zalman fan mounted by the 3.5 drives, and the Scythe).

As I was connecting the front panel ports from the case to the Gigabyte mobo, I realized that it didn't have Firewire onboard. That was a bit of a surprise. Luckily the old PC getting retired had a FireWire card in it, so the cannibalization process began (and wouldn't end with just the FireWire card, either).

After everything was hooked up, I got my Ubuntu 6.06 (I hesitate to call it Breezy Badger) AMD64 live CD ready, and started up the power. Wow! It started! It always amazes me that I haven't crossed any cables or connected something backwards, and that the thing starts instead of melting into a slagheap.

And boy, the thing is QUIET. The two noisiest things are when a disc is spinning in the optical drive, and the access on the Seagate drive (it sounds like a hamster is bumping around inside the case). But definitely waaaaaay quieter than the old system.

I booted from the Ubuntu live CD just fine, so I decided to partition and install Ubuntu on 60GB of the drive, leaving 170GB or so for the Windows install. Again, all installed fine (with the exception of some issues with the 64-bit version of Xgl and compiz, resolved by adding some different repositories to sources.list). So I decided to get Windows running on the big partition... and that's where the problems began.

First problem: drive not recognized. Hm. Did some snooping, and guess what? My copy of Windows XP that I was going to install on this system, which is only at Service Pack 1, doesn't support SATA drives. Joy. The two options were loading the drivers from a floppy, or doing something called "slipstreaming," basically taking a Windows install CD, copying it, and then adding useful things like additional service packs, critical updates, and (in my case) drivers. I tried some of the online utilities and tutorials, burned 3 or 4 CDs, but I was obviously doing something wrong, as I couldn't get the slipstreamed discs to recognize the SATA drive.

So it was time for Option 2... ugh, floppies. I cannibalized the floppy drive from the old PC (hey, five years ago I was still using floppies on PC I guess, even though the iMac had done away with them), installed it into the Antec (even though it was beige and the Antec is black, ugh ugh), used the Gigabyte utilities on another floppy-burdened system to build a driver disk, and gave it another shot.

Lo and behold, all worked, and Windows installed. I immediately updated to SP2 and installed AVG anti-virus and ZoneAlarm firewall and Lavasoft Adaware anti-spyware software. It's Windows, after all. But, of course, installing Windows wiped out the original master boot record, so I couldn't boot into Ubuntu any more. Easiest recourse (after reading some of my other options) was just to reinstall Ubuntu.

So now, other than moving stuff from old Windows/Ubuntu machine to new Windows/Ubuntu machine, I'm pretty much done, other than just basking in all that speed and all that quiet.

Superb high resolution wallpapers (up to 2560x1600)

Gotta bookmark this site, so I'll blog it too so I can remember. Many quite-nice wallpaper pictures, conveniently sorted by screen size, etc.

read more | digg story

More on the 360's HD-DVD add-on drive

Hm, apparently a bit more info came out yesterday concerning the HD-DVD add-on drive for the 360. It connects through the USB 2.0 port... interesting. No word about HDMI or the image constraint token. The most interesting bit was pricing: the Microsoft dude said "it's going to be the cheapest HD-DVD player you can buy." Now, does that mean it's the cheapest you can buy if you already OWN a 360? Or it's the cheapest you can buy even if you need to go out and get a 360? If the latter, the add-on drive is going to be pretty darn cheap.

Microsoft: 360 HD-DVD drive will be cheapest - News at GameSpot

Ferdinando Matador

Just trying out VideoEgg. Recognize anyone?

Plasma is a girl's best friend?

Ars Technical posted a link to an article from Oprah's Oxygen cable channel, that claims "three-quarters of American women would prefer a plasma television to a diamond solitaire necklace."

To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld: "Where? Are? These? Women?"

Plasma is a girl's best friend?

Running Photoshop with Wine

I installed Wine on my Ubuntu partition a couple days ago and was surprised how easy it was to get going (with Automatix help, of course). I was able to get at least one important application running (KidPix Deluxe 4) and want to try some others. I'll have to see if I can get Photoshop going... this article talks about how to do it and what the pitfalls are.

Philippine News -- Manila Standard Today -- Photoshop in Linux -- aug01_2006