13 Nov 2007
My old OCZ 520 died a few months back, sadly, and I’d been running on a cheap and nasty power supply ever since (mostly on account of it being all I could afford at the time, and that the power supply conked out just when setting up for something!)
It was super nice and super shiny and under a super 5 year warranty, but only if I shipped it back to the US, at a cost of around $150. Crazy, huh? I’m sure there were cheaper options, but I couldn’t find them. And they probably involved boats, which just take too long :P
Anyway, I went to buy a video camera yesterday and sort-of-impulse-bought (coz I was at the store and had been thinking I really should get a decent PSU before something bad happens for a few months) a Corsair HX-620W. It had great reviews and was meant to be super quiet which is mostly what attracted me to it — I mean, sure, reliable power is great… but quiet PCs are better! I could’ve gone the Seasonic S12 but it’s not modular, or the M12, but it’s louder (extra 6cm fan)… so the Corsair, despite probably being manufactured by the same company and sharing a lot of identical design features, won.
It’s modular, which the OCZ wasn’t. Not a massive deal, but nice nonetheless. Makes for a tidier case:
You can see the modular connectors here:
I’m not using any of the SLI power at the minute (probably ever) but, again, nice to have in a future-proofing kind of way.
It’s also got one particularly massive fan. The OCZ had two 80mm fans that were super efficient and barely ever made any noise at all, but bigger typically means slower rotation & less whining noises, so it has to be a good thing. My HSF is massive enough and you can see even it’s small in comparison.
I also took advantage of the cleaning-up-the-insides to properly attach a few CCFLs that’d been lying around. Finally, the UV-responsive motherboard can glow properly!
I know, IDE cables suck… I’ve only got one IDE drive left, and it’s actually just there as a spare. Should take it out but haven’t had a chance just yet.
Anyway, whilst I was doing all this I realised my graphics card fan wasn’t spinning at all. It’d been making some funny noises when I’d done some stuff inside the case in the past, but I’d always dismissed it because nothing was crashing and I hadn’t changed anything to do with the graphics card. Turns out it hadn’t actually been spinning for ages and the fan had the driest bearings I’ve ever seen. The heatsink was plenty hot, but nothing was crashing. My system (CPU + memory) runs about 15% above clock but I’ve had no real cause to overclock the graphics card (Fury aside, but it needs more than just a faster clock!). So, consider this research that a cheap and nasty Palit GeForce 7600 GS can run with only passive cooling!
Ironically, that fan has the newest bearing in the system.
After I’d put everything back together I realised the chipset fan could probably do at the very least with a clean, but had rebooted by then and left it well enough alone.
Singer Oil is great, but I tried some spray Aquatec lubricant also which seems to be a little finer and would probably work quite well. The graphics fan squeaked a little when it started up… not quite sure why! It was pretty well oiled, but maybe it was still just working through the bearings completely.
Anyway… I think this computer’s nearly ready for summer’s soaring temperatures and increased power instability.
06 Nov 2007
For the duration of the above processor load shot, my computer remained completely usable. Am running a Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ at 2.4GHz (same clock as what I ran my old Athlon 64 3200+ at, haven’t attempted overclocking particularly vigorously just yet) and it’s so much better. Just for the switch-between-applications/preventing being slowed down factor. For the price, totally worth the productivity benefits.
I wouldn’t have ever really got a dual processor system because of the tremendous cost premium they commanded, and I’m still not quite sold on quad-core systems (except for video rendering), but two cores on a single processor die is cheap enough and beneficial enough that I really wonder why you wouldn’t get one these days.
“Beneficial enough” meaning in terms of having an extra bit of headroom to essentially mitigate against crashes in the form of processor hogging tasks. That alone is enough to make it great, aside from the obvious launch/use-multiple-apps-at-once advantage. This is before you even start thinking about multi-threaded apps (mostly just video, but worth considering, especially if you ever do encoding stuff).
Mine set me back $100 delivered and probably extended the usable life of this desktop by about another 12 months. It’s the switching-between-apps thing that makes computers “feel” slow more than anything else, and this technology solves that problem perfectly. Pretty good for a dead processor architecture (Socket 939)!
The only downside to it? Thermal power is up from 67W to 89W… but it’s still cheaper (temperature cost) than two real processors.
03 Nov 2007
A list of International TLDs is available on the IANA website. This includes the 11 IDNA i18n ‘test’ domain names as of today, and excludes .root. Useful for knowing what your regex needs to match for email validation! Shortest 2, Longest 6, Longest inc. IDNA 18. There are no email users in the IDNA space at time of writing (and, at any rate, if they are they probably wouldn’t be particularly well supported by legacy email and DNS systems just yet!).
01 Nov 2007
Boring post subject, I know. But check this out:
Took around a full minute for the folder to load, on an Athlon 64 3200+ clocked at 2.4GHz with 2GB of fairly quick memory.
Since when do apps alert in the tray about loading a view? If Outlook didn’t expend resources on a generally-useless tray icon (really, it doesn’t even change when you have new mail waiting), maybe it wouldn’t take so bloody long to do anything.
I’ve got a dual core 4200+ on the way, but really doubt it’ll make any difference when the fault is largely software that sucks. Not saying that it’s just Outlook at fault… I’m inclined to place a fair degree of blame on the well-known-to-be-sucky Windows Desktop Search. But it just integrates best… why does Microsoft have to produce products that suck?!
Speaking of which, my iPaq is working again with a brand new extended battery. Apart from the slow processor, it’s doing great… but I’m going to test-drive a Palm Z72 for a few days and see if it does any better. Basically, I don’t really need the GSM/GPRS functionality on the iPaq because it’s faster for me to connect via my Sony Ericsson via Bluetooth (as there’s no HSDPA on the iPaq). I’ll immediately miss the wireless, but have survived several months without it, and SDiO wifi cards are a possibility for the palm… I doubt they’re particularly common, though. Have been considering a Blackberry, but they’re pretty restricted in a whole heap of ways that PDAs aren’t. For example, ever tried getting an SSH client on a Blackberry? I haven’t. But have my doubts it could be done!
Anyway. Don’t use Outlook 2007 unless you have to. It has nice multi-calendar/iCal support, but that’s about all it has going for it. Still no inbuilt SMS/MMS support, the renderer is a regression in the truest sense of the term (doesn’t even support background images — IE7 comes out, which is an awesome browser, and they decide it would be a good idea to force Word 2007 to be the renderer. Brilliant.), thoroughly mediocre RSS/feed-reading capabilities, and, to top it all off, it’s crap-slow (compared to earlier versions).
If it offers groupware advantages I don’t know of them (but doubt it could, it’s always been fairly comprehensive on that front), and chances are they won’t be particularly enabled until Server 2008 is released. Am guessing here, but not without some reasoning.
Avoid.
p.s. Yes, I’m probably overdue for a Windows reinstall. Unfortunately a fairly major project cropped up just as I’d scheduled one, and I still haven’t got around to it. Will probably hunt down the right product key when the new CPU gets here early next week: that’s a large part of the problem, Microsoft apparently expect that home users either buy prebuilt systems with stupid crapware-filled restore disks, or are hardcore tech using pirates/MSDN users (same thing… the users rarely paid for the MSDN subs, mostly its their workplace). I have 5 XP Pro licenses of different varieties (not to mention previous versions of Windows), and of those a bunch are the same product type (upgrade)… which makes license management and compliance a bit of a challenge!
What I’d love MS to do is create a site-licensing product for SOHO users with flexible and transferable licensing at retail OEM pricing (that sounds dumb, but I mean still charging what us mortals pay for OEM licenses, not the volume prices that Dell, Lenovo, et al. get) — it’d be simple, web administered (not requiring a local server), and increasingly relevant in homes which are featuring more and more computers.
24 Oct 2007
People go to tremendous steps to utilise mainstream media effectively. This week, one of my clients has fast-tracked a complete rebuild of their (generally underperforming) website in direct response to perhaps twenty-seconds of primetime TV feature on a highly rating show.
Cost is pretty much no object: the potential gains in brand and business development are entirely unrepeatable. Their marketing & promotion strategy is fairly web-centric, and arguably the single best TV spot outcome one could hope for is direction to a rich information portal. The web, like no other medium, offers this for a comparably diminutive cost.
Not only do you get higher conversion rates than you would if a phone number were displayed, but you can also stem the inflow of enquiries to a more manageable rate than television would otherwise generate. This week I’m rapidly developing a new website for them, but also aiming to implement a new VoIP mechanism to effectively manage the anticipated telephone traffic surge. This is for a small business with no employees sitting at a desk 9-5 ready to take calls: they require a particularly agile strategy to appropriately leverage this media opportunity.
At the end of the day, the content of the actual television spot is relatively insignificant. If it converts to web traffic, it’s done its job. The web (and, in particular, telephone contact and subsequent relationships) is the crucial component in this marketing mix. It provides a way to appear as big as TV with finite resource constraints. Operating on such a limited time scale, we can’t throw money at this project fast enough to make it succeed: the limitation is in human resourcing and man-hours, rather than provisioning additional technology to achieve optimum capacity.
This client can respond to close-timeframe business opportunities in days, not months, chiefly through judicious application of Internet-based technologies (and a tremendously concentrated amount of hard work!)