Upgrayed Pt. 2

So. Now I know what I want:

CPU
Motherboard
RAM
Power Supply (cause any motherboard/CPU I upgrade to will need more power than my old solution was using. make sure you take that into account when youre purchasing upgrades. Power is plenty important and can be the source of many a problem.)

Now I need to shop around. I am blessed enough to live in a city that caters to the industry. In addition to more Comp USA's, Best Buys's, and Computer City's than I can easily count- Theres 3 Fry's stores that serve this city alone. Thats just overkill, but I certainly dont mind it. For instant gratification in your BYOC (Build your own computer) venture, Fry's is a good place to start. Spend time with the sales reps learn about the pieces youre buying, check specs against multiple products and make a selection, in one of the best stores for that kind of consumer goodness. I am also of the good fortune to have worked in a small store that does computer assembly and parts sales and So I know people who i can ask for opinions and can trust to get quality parts. Sometimes I'll pay a little more, but i know im buying something i wont be returning the next day. (which.. happens more often than i like to admit).
So I shopped. I dont want to spend too much, cause im not independently wealthy and my money tree has been confiscated by the government. I set a conservative ceiling of 200 dollars. So. I tell the guys I know (or you would tell the sales guy) what you want and how much you want to spend. Be specific. If you dont want to swing wild from your estimate, dont give them much room to sell you. Know what things you want and what things you dont and while you should be firm, do listen to their suggestions. If they suggest that the 19 dollar power supply wont work, find out why the 200 dollar one will, then find one somewhere in the middle that does the same thing. Another alternative is to have your parts shipped in. You can find really good deals (ill tell you where in another post) if you dont mind thinking ahead and having your things shipped to you. Though, getting your shipped parts in a timely fashion can pretty much obliterate any savings you got on the parts themselves unless you get some free shipping. Which some places offer.

I did both. I contacted my good friends locally, Had them order some parts to their store, assemble and test them then I added the components I found at their store to my order. I paid a little over my estimate, but I got quality parts, tested, and I trust who I was buying from- and thats certainly worth the cost of shipping.

So. In a couple days I'll have the pieces I need to actually complete this upgrade and get to the real work. Stay Tuned to find out what horrible mistake ive already made!!!

WinRARRRRR!

So as you might have heard I'm building a new media storage place. And that means Ive got to move everything from one place to the other (and consolidating at the same time). But what if you have gobs and gobs of music and don't want to wait 14 years for your file to file copy to go through, you should really think on compressing the data before you send it.

Enter the WinRAR
Theres a few good compression utilities you can use, PKUNZIP and WinZip are among what must be tons, but WinRAR is what *I* use, and so thats what I'm talking about. I was able to set it up so that I compressed all the music I owned and moved it to the place i wanted it sent and when it gets there I can have WinRAR unpack it all just like where it came from- it's a very sturdy little piece of program. Moving, Backing up, sharing, most people use some kind of utility when doing one or all of those activities and for my money (free, incidentally) WinRAR wins.

Upgrayed Pt. 1

When we left our intrepid hero..

I was kneeling sobbing, amidst piles of wires and case fragments. "It's dead, Jabs", Ben called casually from the couch sipping on grape Gatorade watching the latest Weeds episode. I'm kneeling here, sleeves rolled up with the wires and hard drives of my middle child laying around me and he's making Star Trek jokes. Assassination queue: +1. But he's right. I'm not getting this computer back together again and honestly, I don't want to. Too many of the components are too difficult to replace be it for price or availability, and I could use more oomph. Time to upgrade. But to what?

I've been here before. Time to shop, money to spend, and oceans of choices. I'm a firm believer in "The right tool for the right job". I don't get a 10-ton press when all i need is a tack hammer. Same thing for computers. I don't get the Quad Core Mega Awesome ULTRABLASTER CPU with 128 Terrabytes of hotRAM, if I'm not going to be singlehandedly completing the Colonization of Mars. It'd be nice to have all that power, but I built multiple machines for a reason. I tinker with a lot of projects and I like having a few different complete systems to share the load around. (also, when i totally blow it with one of my hair-brained schemes, I'm not totally screwed) So, what will i buy for this machine? First, Whats it goign to be doing? For a lot of people, its either Work, Home, or Super Face Melting Gaming Experience but for me, I need to expand on those topics. I do keep a modest computer for keeping up with emails and bills and news and such and I am a geek so I did build as much of a face melter as I could afford, but for work.. I cant have one single machine for "work". Between media storage and distribution , network tinkering, graphics and web page fiddling, etc.. theres a lot of concerns to keep in mind. For me, This new machine will be a new media distribution point. A new place to feed music, and video to my network. Which is good. Ive been meaning to upgrade the one I'm using and in doing so, I can build a dedicated network sniffer with the old media center. It's win/win , I'm bringing new purpose to an old box by building a new one.

Second, I do a salvage operation. What can I keep, What should I toss. DVD is a solid format not only for movies and stuff but for lots of data and has backward compatibility with CDs. If the DVD player works and you don't need to upgrade to a burner (and I don't) thats a no brainer. Keep it. The hard drives are kind of the same way, as long as their size is something you can deal with then keep them. I'm going to add storage to this computer, so ill be buying a hard drive, but really, I wont need much more than I've got. Which is good. I don't print my own money, so i try not to shovel it away when i don't have to. The CPU and Motherboard of this machine will have to go. For one they're bad, but also, the parts are older than i can replace reliably. If I decided to keep the motherboard and just do the processor, finding one would be a pain, id more than likely need to ship it to me. Same for the Ram that would go on the motherboard if i decided to keep *it*. All of that will need to be redone. I wont need much in the way of graphics, and quite honestly for what ill be doing I can probably find a motherboard with a graphics card , sound card, and network card built in. Thats a whole flock of birds with one stone and a bunch of crazy ricochets. So. Where to buy all this cra- er, equipment?

Stay tuned!

Welcome to NaBloPoMo?

Today kicks off NaBloPoMo! which, as I understand it is the month that everybody who has a blog posts something to that blog every single day to make up for the oceans of dead air that would otherwise await readers who stumble across it. And so. To jump right on the bandwagon:

This month!!!

Upgrayed! - Follow the trials of me trying to get a tiny machine off the ground on the cheap. Practicing what I preach! (Don't tell anybody)

Online Shopping for the holidays! - Where to shop, How to shop, Who not to give your credit card numbers to. Namely me.

My computer can do that?! - Email, Myspace, Websurfing, shopping... you say theres a word processor in here too? What else can my computer do? Plenty! I'll give you a heads up about some other uses.

The Inbetween Days- Bet you thought I sat hunched over the keyboard day and night thinking up things to type into my blog. Well, I do. But these are some things I think about doing if I ever decided to get up.

... And prolly much much more! Cause.. November has a whole lot of days.

Conspiracies Exposed!

Ok not really. It's been a long time coming, but this isnt it. THIS post is about Microsoft. First tho, some things about my favorite topic: Me.

Its no secret having read some of my earlier blogs that Im no stranger to the windows family. My dad worked at IBM, I was trained on the Microsoft platform and products, DOS, then Windows- so, I reference them often. Which says nothing about what I think of them as a company or their political stance or any of that. Al that means, is that I run their software and It gets the job done at least to my meager standards. Since that time, my OS library has increased and ive explored other platforms, been trained on other systems and learned much much more about the field I've chosen and in some cases, yes I have found better solutions away from the Microsoft umbrella. Still tho, I keep a windows machine in current and in good working order. Just in case.

I came across an article about the windows search agent being forced to desktops during a Microsoft update regardless of whether or not you turned that featured off. The effect is that the windows desktop agent gets downloaded and run and starts cataloging (indexing) the contents of your C: after a windows update. Unfortunate, especially if you elected 'no'. What Im concerned about is the frequency that people said this was another instance of Microsoft flexing its all powerful muscles and not caring about the customers it continually punches in the head and gut. I have a hard time following that line of conspiracy theorism. (Yes. I made that up right on the spot.)

Microsoft is a company. Companies like money and they get most of it from us. Consumers. No matter how saturated the playing field is with their product I dont think any company that has private sector sales can afford to piss off their client base. Maybe some of them, but certainly not all of them and definitely not consistently. It might seem like sometimes all of a particular group of people dont like a specific change, but 1) it probably wasnt done intentionally, 2) if it was, it was probably for another reason that doesnt involve tweaking our collective noses and 3) the group that was offended is probably not the general public who wouldnt notice most of what goes on 'under the hood' anyway.

Some companies do have it out for you. I dont know that Microsoft is one of those. But from a purely down to earth stand point consider the following. No customers, for whatever reason means no money. And while bill gates alone has more money than God, he's not cranking out software by himself. If he's not afraid of us for that reason, he should be.

----------------
Now playing: Horace Silver - Song For My Father
http://foxytunes.com/artist/horace+silver/track/song+for+my+father

Housecleaning

Your computer, depending on use will every now and again require some general maintenance and care. Changing the oil, kicking the tires- that kind of thing. Since I'll be getting alot of this done on my systems this weekend, I thought Id blog about the process.

My usage varies. As serious as I want to claim that I am, I did build a computer to do my gaming on. I like to tell myself I did it because I wanted to keep my gaming files away from the machine most prone to viruses, and I certainly didnt want performance compromised on my file and web servers- so thats my story and I'm sticking to it. So, right to it.

Im thinking most computers will fall into this category. I send/receive emails, do downloads, do more downloads, and save files for sharing and such like that. Thats alot of online time with systems I cant control and dont always trust. So, in addition to the malware scans and the firewall I also take some time every week to defrag the drives the computer stores data on. Fragmentation occurs when the system cant or wont allocate enough contiguous space to store a complete file all together, but instead puts parts of it in gaps between other files (you get gaps in the first place because they used to hold a file that the system has subsequently deleted). Big files and big numbers of files help you get fragmentation faster and the drive slows down trying to sort through all the data to find you what you need (want). Defragmentation attempts to alleviate these problems.

The process of creating new files, and changing old ones , is sometimes called 'churn' and is, like fragmentation happens at main directory and subdirectory level. When you defrag your system, the program uses empty space on the drive to shuffle the data around to put files back where they should be. Files that should be next to eachother, get back together in a very memory intensive dance that cannot be performed on a system that has no freespace.
*some* files cannot be moved. System files, the swap file and other files labeled 'read only' wont be moved- but everything else is fair game. This can cause a problem say, if you copy a CD onto your harddrive. Files on a CD retain their 'read only' status when they hit your hardrive and you may end up with a big load of britney spears that you cant move for no good reason.
Also, while I'm thinking about it- a big misconception about defrag is that it stops your computer from acting wiggy. (Wiggy is a technical term) Not So! Your filesystem is designed to work around fragmented filespace. It works slower, but it works. What happens is, to run a defrag you must first run a chkdsk [chkdsk is a filesystem checkup utility]. Since it ends up being run first and usually fixes any problems it finds, people find their systems running all dandy after the defrag and assume that was the fix. Close. But no family friendly candy cigarettes.
Every system needs it every now and again, for me that one computer needs it more often. Not always because I notice it running slower or because i hear weird noises*. But because I know I shuffle bits on that computer like nobody's business. And If i want to keep performance up and my title as general nerd- I gotta put in the work.

If youre reading this youll prolly only need to do this at most every couple weeks, but you know what you do on your computer. Use your good judgment.

Ciao

* You know what it sounds like when your harddrive is doing what its supposed to. If you hear anything that even remotely sounds like your garbage disposal, hard shuddering clicks, polka music, or the like from your harddisk when you notice problems? Thats bad. Have it checked out. Soon.

Remember Two Things (DMB fans will understand)

These two things I think are just ducky and I thought you guys might like to read about them.


Thing One: Philly. Home of the Liberty Bell, the Cheese steak sammich and now, the very first city i know about under the warm snuggly blanket of wi-fi. Yes, The entire city (or at least 135 square miles of it) are going wireless. That is, anybody under that massive blanket will not only be incredibly hot- they will have internet access. All public areas, Most private areas not inside a microwave oven or a building - all wifi. And mostly for free.(although you do have to register with Earthlink) In some places the wireless thats already set up has a stronger signal and im sure theres bound to be some other problems but this is a HUGE step towards 'internet for everybody' and while thats going to be a challenge, I thin kits a worthy one.

and Thing Two: Two colleges on either coast are working out a system for disaster recovery between the two of them. Fantasticness! Disaster recovery is a big thing with me. What to do when your hard drive goes off the reservation and all your data goes to p00p. Most people have copies on another driver (but what if theres a fire) and some companies use off site storage or even third parties that are specifically setup to offer that kind of service - but can cost incredible amounts of money. By working together these two schools have kept their cost relatively low and the distance.. What can you say they're on opposite ends of the country.