With Windows 8 right around the corner it’s time to build a new desktop PC that will scream for both development and gaming.
Having set a personal budget of around $1500 I started the arduous process that every DIY PC builder has gone through… researching parts and playing with specifications until it feels just right.
A series of posts on system fonts:
With the 8-bit system fonts post being so popular I just had to jump right in and look at the system fonts available on the 16-bit machines!
The Xbox 360 enjoyed its second year and titles continue to impress although the count is still a little on the weak side. The addition of 1080p output was a great bonus but one many people (myself included) can’t take advantage of without a HDMI cable and nobody seems entirely sure if the 360 can pump out a digital video signal (I doubt it).
On-line support is blooming although can get very expensive if you want all the extras for games you’ve already paid for – come on guys we put £40 down gives a few freebies!
My first ever hard-disk was a whopping 2GB when 340MB was considered high-end. £800 meant it was a steal – an end-of-line trade-only offer…
A massive double-height 5.25″ SCSI behemoth from DEC that sounded like a turbine powering up. It had a gyroscopic effect that could whip your hand off and a seek noise that resonated through the house in the early hours of the morning as another caller trawled Black Ice BBS’s file library.
Apple announced their Boot Camp technology – basically a set of drivers for Windows XP, a wizard to help resize your existing disk partition and the necessary magic to load XP from the EFI BIOS.
I can imagine the Windows on Mac Intel project that raised $12,000 USD are wondering why they bothered…
This year I broke with my life-long tradition and spent Christmas not at my parents house with my family but with my girlfriend and her family in Germany.
The flight there was uneventful but dull thanks to Aurigny’s one-flight-per-day to Stansted at mid-day. This means 5 hours + of milling around. Thankfully Stansted isn’t quite as bad as I recalled and there are a few book and game shops to browse around in and I managed to keep my shopping down to a mere 3 books… Shame I already had 3 in my backpack.
I recently splashed out on a Dell 24″ 2405FPW wide-screen display. With the 20% discount offer (Small Business site only!?), living in VAT-free Guernsey and shipping being a very reasonable £5 the whole thing came to a sound £588.
As I already own an LCD, the capable Iiyama 20″ E511, and my current Radeon 9800 Pro is equipped with just one DVI connector I was going to need a new AGP graphics card equipped with two or suffer blurry images.
Okay, so the memory was sorted which left me with two things I wanted doing. The parts this time were from UK supplier Overclock, not to be confused with Overclockers from the previous posting. Both suppliers delivered very quickly and automatically took off the VAT for me, one of the perks of living in Guernsey but one that is all to often eroded by inflated shipping costs, neither of which these two suppliers can be accused of :)
A quick scan through the few options available led me to the AeroCool CoolPanel. It features an 8-in-1 card reader, two USB 2.0 ports, an IEEE-1394 (FireWire) port, two Serial ATA (SATA) ports, composite video out, audio line in/headphones/mic sockets, two fan speed controllers and a blue LCD display showing two temperatures via it’s thermal diode cables and the fan rotations of the two fans it is controlling.
I recently performed a few upgrades to keep my PC up-to-speed and thought I’d share a few tips.
You really need to know what’s going on inside your PC and Everest is a great package to do just that. It will tell you more information about the components in your PC that you’d care to know about and can also be used to peek in on the temperature of the CPU, hard-disk and graphics chip providing your system supports it. Best of all the Home version is free although there are commercial versions for corporate and “ultimate” usage too if you have a few dollars ($29.95 at the moment) to spend.