Guest Blogged by Tim Garcia

Well Slayer mentioned that I like to upgrade my PC every three weeks but I wish I only could do that. lol Pretty much as soon as you get a new upgrade it is out of date within a few weeks but luckily most products are not able to use the newest technologies that are out there so that gives current products a fairly long shelf life. I am always looking to see what upgrades are out there and I mostly look at Tiger Direct and Newegg to see what is new and check out the prices.

Here is my current configurations of my PC’s and wanted upgrades.

Current System: Main PC (Built system December 2007)

• OS: XP Pro 64bit

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X@ Dual Core Processor 6400+ Black Edition

• RAM: 3 Gigs OCZ Reaper Dual Channel 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz

• Video Card: 2 SLI XFX GeForce 8800GT XXX 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 Alpha Dog Edition

• Motherboard: MSI K9N SLI Platinum AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard

• Hard Drive: 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB Hard Drive - 7200, 16MB, SATA-300

• Power Supply: OCZ/GameXStream /700-Watt/ATX/120mm Fan

Wanted Upgrades:

• CPU: AMD Phenom X4 9850 Quad Core Processor

• HD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB Hard Drive - 7200RPM, 32MB, SATA-300

Current System: Secondary PC (Built Approximately 2003-04)

• OS: XP Pro

• CPU: AMD Athlon 1050.0 MHz

• RAM: 1.25 Gigs

• Video Card: ATI Radeon 9500 128MB

• Motherboard: MSI (not sure which model, too lazy to find out).

• Hard Drive: Multiple Maxtor hd’s. Max size of largest hd is 40GB

Wanted Upgrades:

• CPU: Replace with Main PC CPU

• RAM: I have 1 gig of OCZ Reaper available

• Video Card: XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Video Card - 256MB DDR3 (maybe)

• Motherboard: MSI K9N SLI-F Motherboard

• Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB Hard Drive - 7200, 16MB, Serial ATA-300

• DVD Drive: Lite-On 20x LH-20A1L DVD±R with 12x DVD-RAM with Lightscribe

• Power Supply: ThermalTake/PurePower/600-Watt/ATX 2.2/120mm Fan

I am a big believer in AMD, MSI, XFX and Seagate products. CPU wise, Intel makes some good CPU’s but they are overpriced IMO. I think gamer’s prefer AMD over Intel and that is because the frame rates are usually higher then Intel CPU’s and that is what matters when you are playing a game. If you want to overclock your CPU then AMD is the way to go, depending if you have a good cooling system, motherboard and power supply. I haven’t overclocked my system much because I really don’t need to; there really is no game out there that my system can’t handle. I know that these upgrades that I chose are not all top of the line but like I said before, products have a good shelf life and I am getting quality and value at the same time. It will be awhile before I could actually get all the upgrades but the longer I wait the more prices will go down.

If you have any suggestions or anything else then please leave a comment, I would appreciate any feedback.

Here’s a video in which i will present to you the structure of a hard drive. Starting from the jumper and IDE connector area to the structure of the platter you will find out most of the stuff you need to know about a hard drive.

In this video i dissembled my old Matrox hard drive which died on me, it’s main boot sectors are screwed and has lots and lots of BAD on it.

And now all there is left to say is: Enjoy the video and feel free to comment

Yesterday a colleague brought over his PC saying that after a power outage his PC wouldn’t start and that it smelled like something got burned in there. Yesterday i didn’t have time to check it out because i had to finish a wordpress theme(i will post it up a bit later) so i checked it out this morning. At my PC desk everything was a mess, piles of books/papers/electronic components on each other so i decided to make some order after i check out my friend’s PC.

I opened up his PC and it did smell like burned components. I tried starting it up,but it just wouldn’t move(my first suspicion was that the supply got burned). I took my pc and hooked up the supply wires to his PC, and what do you know the PC got back to life . I called my friend and he was pretty excited to hear the good news(that his mainboard and CPU didn’t get screwed). I took out his power supply and told him to buy a 400W one tomorrow and i’ll hook it up.

Just by curiosity i opened up his supply and guess what? the fuse was intact. This is like Murphy’s rule:“everything gets burned down, but the fuse remains intact”.

I noticed that my PC is quite dusty(i don’t leave the side on, because many friends come over with their hard drives and i’m lazy to take it off every time), so i cleaned out my PC, and damn it was dusty. The coolers on the CPU and Video card were filled with dust. Last time i cleaned my PC in december i think.

Here are some pics:

My PC is like 4 years old. Its a good ol’ AMD Sempron 2600+(overclocked to 2000MHZ) with some tune up-s like extra 256 RAM(when i had 256 ram i was swearing because Photoshop was eating it all up, now i have 512 and i’m still swearing because photoshop is eating it all up,lol). and bought a Geforce fx 5500 256MB/128 Bit GPU along with an ASUS DVDRW. Heck it’s good enough for what i’m using it, the only game i have on my PC is counter-strike.

Get a new PC a Notebook?

I’m really considering to buy a HP or Toshiba notebook(with dualcore CPU and at least 2 Gigs of ram WITHOUT Windows Vista) and use it on field and as a home PC.

Here at home i could hook the laptop up to a monitor,  connect my USB mouse and Keyboard to it, remove the batteries(if you use your laptop for a long time it’s plugged into power supply then remove the batteries. You will significantly increase the life of your batteries if you use them only when you don’t have a power supply nearby.)

The investment would cost about 1.5K$, the laptop costing about 1.1k$ and a 20″ LCD monitor 400$. But i’m not prepared to use my money on this, because i’m saving the money for a trip to Greece(in July) and a trip to Hungary and Czech republic(in august), but hopefully i will be able to buy it as a gift for myself this Christmas.

Although My PC is more than 3 years old i’l present you the hardware specs of my PC and the installed softwares.

Hardware Specs:

Back in 2004 when i bought my PC AMD SEMPRON processors just appeared and they were a big hit. So what the heck i decided to buy a PC with a AMD sempron CPU. Back then my PC was 1337(leet) and was one of the best PC’s available on the market(here).

- The CPU is an AMD SEMPRON 2600+ Thoroughbread CPU made for mainboard socket 462(socket A). It has an L1 cache of 64kb and an L2 cache of 256KB. Normally it runs on 1833 MHZ but i overclocked it to 2000MHZ and it’s running like a charm even with the stock cooler.

- The mainboard is ASROCK K7VT4A+ made for AMD Sempron and athlon CPU’s and it has lots of cool features like:

* Supports high performance DDR400 memory
* Hybrid Booster - ASRock safe overclocking
* AGP8X, 5.1-Ch Audio, 10/100 Ethernet LAN
* ASRock I/O : 4 ready-to-use USB2.0 ports

- The GPU(Graphic processing unit, Video card in the common name) is a Palit Daytona GeForce FX5500 which is sold in Retail packaging. It features 256 MB video memory with 128 BIT and was made for AGP 8.x slot. It has a VGA and a S-VIDEO output. Also it features multiple shading technologies like pixel shader 2.0. I bought this GPU last year, the stock GPU was a Geforce MX 440 128mb/64bit video card.

- System Memory: As stock memory i had 256 MB PQI DDRAMS(crap rams) which i upgraded to 512MB Corsair DDRam and they are running like a charm!

- My current hard drive is a Elixir 80GB HDD with 8mb cache and IDE connectivity and to be honest this was the cheapest and pretty good 80Gb hard drive i could find. My old Hard drive recently died(it was a MAXTOR 80GB with 2mb cache).

- As optical drives i have an LG 52×32x52 CD writer(it was stock with the PC) and i recently bought an ASUS Lighstscribe DVD writer. Although i never tried out the lightscribe function the writer works like a charm and does its job.

- Keyboard: A compaq keyboard which a friend loaned to me 3 years ago….when my new desk arrives i will buy a new one and will return this one :).

- Mouse: Logitech MX518 Gamer mouse which i recently bought, and i’m waiting for my steelpad 5L(mousepad) to arrive.

- Headphones: Teac HP-5 headphones(great for gaming)

Here Are some Pictures of the System:

*note: All images are enlargeable

I ran a Series of Tests:

3dMark 03 Professional Edition Build 3.6.0:

3DMark is a computer benchmark by Futuremark (formerly MadOnion) to determine the DirectX performance of graphics cards.
The measurement unit 3DMark is intended to give a normalized mean for comparing different visual processing units, which proponents assert is indicative of end-user performance capabilities. Critics counter by stating that it is not a reliable measure of real-world performance.

I can’t say that i’m very pleased of the results, but heck the results are great compared to my PC configuration.

Softwares that i use:

- Browser: Mozilla Firefox latest version, and Opera 9.x as a download manager(i hate DAP thats why i use it)

- Music player: Winamp Latest Version

- Multimedia: ACE MEGA CODECS PACK + ffdshow + Matroska splitter

- Antivirus: Kaspersky Internet Security Latest build

- Instant Messaging: Yahoo Messenger 8

- CD/DVD Burning: Ahead Nero 7

- Image Editing: Adobe Photoshop/Imageready CS2

- File Manager/FTP software: Total Commander Powerpack

- CD/DVD Image Mounting: PowerISO

- Picture Viewer: IrfanView

- P2P/File Sharing: Peerweb DC++ and uTorrent

- Installed Games: Steam(CS:S, CS 1.6, Half Life, Condition Zero), Warcraft 3 TFT, Disciples 2 - The rise of elves

Remember that the main purpose of softwares is to help you not to slow down your PC. This means that you should install software only from sources that you trust and only if you think that it can help you in your activity.

On wednesday i was at electronics, the professor knew that i’m good at pc’s so we went down in the basement from where we took out 6 PI pc’s and we also found a PC from 1986 which i’m going to present to you guys.

First of all its pretty heavy, many components are missing, but still it’s weight is somewhat around 7-8KGs because of the iron/copper case

*Note: all pics are enlargeable!

Also the PC features a lock button to prevent access to it

The PC doesn’t have a single mainboard, originally it had 10 ISA slots in which the mainboards were introduced:the memory/CPU/other components.

The CPU is a intel 386 CPU manufactured in 1985(back then it was a big hit, even when it got to my country in ‘92 it was a huge hit)

The 368 Intel CPU has 168 PINS(today’s INTEL quadcore CPU has 240 Pins)

In the pic below the small DARK-BLACK chips represent the memory(RAM)

The PC also had a board for connectivity with printers(Parallel port)

IF you open up a P2 PC in some you will still find ISA slots( you can find more info about ISA slots at WIKIPEDIA )

The components were taken down from the mainboard (the professor needed them to throw away the box and the empty boards) but i got to keep the CPU as a nice souvenir

If some parts wouldn’t have missed and every part would have been intact most probably i would have tried to start it up and not strip it.

Apple, the company which made the worldwide popular gadgets: Macbook, iTouch, iPod and iPhone launched yesterday the world’s thinnest notebook: Macbook Air. The festivity had place in San Francisco and was lead by the billionaire Steve Jobs.

Macbook Air features a 13.3 inch widescreen display + built-in iSight camera and it features a powerful Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6GHZ processor along with 2GB of memory+ bluetooth 2.1 port and it costs 1700$(IMO its damn expensive, i would rather get a DELL Alienware PC or a HP or Fujitsu but if you need mobility and lightweight this is the best solution for you.)

The shipping of the product will start in 2weeks when the product will also be available in stores( i bet many people are enthusiasted about it)

They don’t call it the world’s thinnest notebook for nothing!

The screen’s width is only 2mm, the body’s width is 2cm and it weights only 1.3kg, meaning if you put it in a backpack there are big chances that your backpack will be heavier than the notebook

My overall rating:

You can see in the first part of the video that the mainboard and all components  except the power supplyare filled up with oil. Now you are probably wondering how is this possible:

Oil doesn’t conduct electricity, and  in the video they are filling the components up with it. Oil has the great feature that it is dense and electronic components will work without any problem. If we look at it from an other perspective it is the perfect cooling system, it doesn’t need maintanance and it will surely do the job at its best.

An oil is any substance that is in a viscous liquid state (”oily”) at ambient temperatures or slightly warmer, and is both hydrophobic (immiscible with water, literally “water fearing”) and lipophilic.

If you have some extra time feel free to do it, but remember to keep your power supply dry and in a sealed area.

Well yeah…as you see i haven’t posted for 3 days, this was because of hardware issues, to be more specific my Hard drive gave up on me(died) and i needed to buy a new one.

It all started last week:

1. My pc didn’t want to recognize the hard drive at system start
2. It recognized it only after i moved the hard drive around and m kicked it once or twice(really)

At first i taught its because of the dust, so as i arrived home monday i opened up my PC and removed each and every removable part(RAM/PCI devices/Video card/hard drive/optical drives/IDE cables) and i cleaned out my pc.

I taught that solved it, but when i wanted to start up my pc same thing happened, so i reset the BIOS, putting a jumper on the CMOS pins…nothing happened, i read in a PC world magazine(yeah back in 2003 i used to buy PC world/PC magazine/Level(gaming magazine) ) that not every time Reseting BIOS from CMOS jumpers helps and the best thing to do is to remove the battery from the mainboard, and so i did, but still i was facing the same problem.

A friend suggested that i use other IDE cables, because maybe the connectors are broken, so i did that but still the same..

So i Had 3 options in my mind:

1. My hard drive is broken
2. My mainboard isn’t functioning well
3. The power supply is causing the problems

Time For testing!

I pulled out my Pentium 2 PC(Damn you have no idea how much it helps to have a secondary pc even if you only use it when you need to fix your other PC.) and i removed the 6.4GB Hard drive from it and hooked it up with my PC.

IT WORKED FLAWLESSY! At booting the pc recognized it immediately, and this was the thing that convinced me that my hard drive is broken

After 3 days of testing i finally found out what was the problem. Good thing it wasn’t the mainboard because that would have really been tragic for me.

The next day i hardly started up my PC with the hard drive and burned on a CD the 2 important designs that had to be finished by today. I realized that my hard drive started ticking and it just stopped.

Yesterday i went to the PC shop and bought a new hard drive for 52$(80GB excelsor w/ 8mb buffer), even though i lost all data from other hard drive i’m happy that my PC is working and i can continue work. My other hard drive(check picture) lasted 3 years of pain and suffering and extreme usage so no wonder it died.

Tomorrow i will hook up the defective hard drive and il try to start it up(i still have some PSD’s that i need(they are pretty unimportant but good to have) ) and hopefully i can pull the data i need.

So remember: If your pc isn’t working make sure you check all possibilities before you buy a new part, if you don’t do a detailed check you may end up buying a part that is functioning well -> waste of money.

If you don’t know how to fix PC’s and such i highly recommend you take your PC to service where experts can tell you what the problem is and what really needs to be changed.

Many people put in their minds: “Tomorrow i will go and buy myself a new laptop” and the next day they spend 3/4 of their day going from shop to shop and gathering info on the laptop offers. Either they check out the offers and go back and buy the laptop or they go home and before going to sleep they check out the offers again just to make sure they choose the best one and the next day they buy the laptop they chose and end up by buying a laptop that in 2-3 months will regret that they bought it.

Lots and lots of people are smart-headed and think they can do it on their own and don’t even call a friend or ask a relative who has experience on the IT&C field to go with them and help them choose. And this way the sellers in stores try to screw you over as much as they can.

I was in a PC shop looking at some accessories when a guy comes in looking for RAM, he specifies that he wants DUAL DDR and specifies its frequency. The seller takes out 5 types or RAM and starts showing it to him…as i recall the ram’s brands we’re: Kingmax,Geil,chrossair,syncron,elixir.

Ofcourse Geil was the most expensive so the buyer from start said that he doesn’t want it. He was in quite a dilemma when the seller started saying: ” syncron is a very bought ram type and all of our customers we’re satisfied and even i got that type of RAM and never had problems” (its price was almost as much as Kingmax was) So the naive buyer bought the syncron ram and he went home happy with his brand new ram. The seller smiled and went back to work, imo he said to himself: “Whoohoo!! i screwed over one more guy”

DON’T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE, IF YOU HAVE THE POSSIBILITY ASK A FRIEND WHO HAS SOME IT&C KNOWLEDGE TO GO WITH YOU WHEN YOU BUY PC RELATED STUFF!

Not lets get back to Laptop related stuff - Here are some points that you should consider checking before buying a Laptop:

The Laptop’s design: Make sure you like the design and it fits you. I’m not talking about just the external looks of the laptop and its color, i’m talking about how the keyboard elements are arranged, the way the screen is attached to the body and the screen size. Older Toshiba laptops(for example Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000 - check image) don’t have a touchpad(like at regular laptops) they have a small button in the middle of the keyboard from where you control the mouse pointer.

The Laptop’s performance: Make sure you set your budget and choose a laptop according to it. you can’t expect to buy a latest generation laptop for a few hundred bucks. Check out the RAM, the video memory and the hard drive specifications. Set your goal for what you will use the laptop, if you will use it for advanced applications that eat much resources than make sure the laptop’s performance can match it!

Networking: Check out if the laptop has wireless networking port/bluetooth/infrared port. Wireless network can be crucial if in your city there is setup a wireless hotspot(from where you can access the internet wireless)

Use your budget wisely: Don;t buy a hyper-super laptop if you can’t take the maximum out of it, buy a laptop that will fulfill a little more than your needs.

Operating system: Most shops sell along the laptops Windows Vista, if you hate/don’t like/don’t want to use/don’t want to pay 250$ more then try to talk to the sellers to take that off.

And again: remember to ask friends to help you if you are unsure of your purchase!

Good Luck!

+ You never taught that simple, common everyday dust can cause serious damage? well think again! Dust can cause really serious damage mostly on electronic accessories(PC,TV,DVD player, etc).Why? Lets just take it from the basics: Dust is unavoidable , you can keep your windows closed all day but still dust will settle. Most of you probably just clean the screen and the box of the TV and electronic accessories, you never think about how many dust settles inside the TV or PC in our case. Dust on electronic components(such as microchips/transistors/condensators) can cause them to overheat and fry(mostly summer when the temperatures rise high above normal).

+ Probably most of you are wondering why am i telling you all this and encouraging you to clean your PC.

Well here’s the answer:

I work in a PC shop at the service department. In about 2weeks more than 25 PC’s we’re brought in( I live in a smaller city which has a population of 160.000 and there are plenty of PC shops in the city so just think totally in the city how many pc’s died). As the customers said: “My computer just won’t start” or “I can turn the Computer on but nothing happens, the screen goes black”.

+ The first thing i did was check if the pc starts, if it started than i opened up the pc and reseted the BIOS(you can do it with a jumper )(the BIOS can cause problems like this also). if everything was the same i closely checked the mainboard(in most cases it was very dusty). My verdict was: “You need to purchase a new mainboard and probably a new CPU also”. If you change your pc’s motherboard and cpu you will need to reinstall Windows also, because it simply won’t work.

+ IF the PC didn’t start i hooked it up with a new power supply box and everything went smooth. The customer payed for the power supply box and the service and he went home with a smile on his face.

+ Your PC is exposed daily to dust , and trust me dust loves your PC. The ventilator in your supply and the ventilator on your pc/graphics card keeps your components cool, but it attracts lots and lots of dust, so its recommended that you clean the inside of your PC every 3 months using a brush and your aspirator. Simple isn’t it? yes yes…i know its a job that takes about 1-2 hours of work but trust me it’s worth it!

Here’s how to effectively clean your pc:

+ Disconnect your pc from energy supply, remove the mouse/keyboard/sound system/printer, everything that is plugged into your Desktop PC.

+ Put your pc on the table or somewhere where you can work flexible with ti and you have enough space.

+ Using a screw driver remove the left side of your pc.

+ Mark the cables coming from the power supply box with different letters( ex: A, B, C) and write down on a paper which cable goes to which component(ex: A goes to hard drive).

+ Remove the power cables form the components and the mainboard(the power cable which is attached to the mainboard cannot be put in a wrong position so you can’t mess anything up)

+ Again using a screw driver unscrew the screws and remove the power supply box from the chase of your PC.

+ Remove the top part of the power supply box and using a brush brush out the dust from it and use the aspirator to suck up the dust, make sure you clean it out well.

+ After your done, put back the top of the power supply box and put it back in the case of your pc just as it was when your removed it.

+ Remove all removable parts from your mainboard(RAM, Graphics card, PCI cards, and the cooler from the cooling frame that is fixed on your CPU) (Make sure you remove ONLY the cooler and not the cooler with the cooling frame, because if you remove them and put them back just like that you may fry your CPU, because a thermo conducting paste is required between the CPU and the cooling frame!)

+ Remove the Hard drive(s), Optical unit(s), Floppy disk drive(s) from the case of your pc and clean them with the brush, after you cleaned them place them back just as they we’re and reconnect the cables that connect them to the mainboard( NOT THE POWER CABLES!).

+ Now using the brush and the aspirator start cleaning your mainboard, make sure you clean every bit of it, after you are done cleaning it just to make sure everything is cleaned blow on the mainboard and see if dust will rise, if it does clean it more)

+ Clean the cooler take off the cooling frame with the brush and after that clean it with cotton wool soaked in alcohol and screw it back to the cooling frame and connect it back to the mainboard.

+ Put all the removeable devices back on your mainboard (RAM, Graphics card, PCI cards) and connect the power cables to the mainboard and to the optical drives/FDD and hard drive.

+ Recheck 2 times that you connected everything right before you start your pc, if you are sure you did everything right then start your pc. If your pc starts BEEEEEEEEP-ing then turn it off and check if you placed the RAM’s right. IF it doesn’t want to boot from hard drive then recheck the connection, do the same if you encounter a problem with optical drives .

+ use your pc for about 1-2 hours and after that enter BIOS and check the temperature of your CPU/mainboard. I guarantee it will be smaller than as it was before you cleaned it.
This is just a method that helps you clean your PC, i don’t take any responsability if something goes wrong/you mess up something!