10 posts from January 2007

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Getting snow is one thing - but it's supposed to be -27° Celsius tomorrow. And it's not exactly anywhere near warm right now either. Stupid winter weather.

It finally started to snow around my neck of the woods! It's about time, considering we've only seen snow two or three times since Winter officially started and normally we'd have constant snow on the ground. Talk about wacky weather! There wasn't even any snow on the ground for Christmas, and that's the first time I've seen that happen since I can remember.

The forecast right now looks miserable, I'm not sure if there will be any classes or not (and I'm hoping there won't be -- I need to get around to typing up some resumes and filling out job applications). The roads as of 9 PM were horrible, slippery, with a lot of freezing rain and ice pellets coming down.

For those of you who are wondering how I'm enjoying my new computer, things are working great. Couldn't possibly be happier.

On Monday, I received two packages: the Battlefield 1942 Complete Collection set that Rich from Windows Observer had picked up for me (many thanks, it's an awesome game and I'm a First Person Shooter addict), and a shiny black sparkling envelope. I looked in the top left hand corner and seen "LOKI" and knew exactly what it was, as I had been following the phenomenon around the Vanishing Point game information over at Neowin.net for the past week or so.

The envelope contained a letter "From the desk of Loki", and a small packet that was the same color as the envelope itself. Inside of the packet was a 256MB USB Memory Stick (which is rather nifty), which contained clues for the Vanishing Point game and a video from Loki.

As some of you may know, the Vanishing Point game is basically a series of complex puzzles which you must figure out. As you figure them out, you'll get points, which will earn you the opportunity to win some cool prizes, including a trip into space to see the Ultimate Vista (yes, you heard me right, space. Provided by Rocketplane XP. Holy shit!). Other prizes include copies of Windows Vista Ultimate and 2007 Microsoft Office Ultimate, some high-end gaming systems from AMD, XBOX 360s, Zune media players, and more. It sounds rather interesting, and I definately plan on playing along with this. Hell, I can't pass down the chance for something that cool. And, even if I don't win, I still got a 256MB USB Memory Key.

Okay, we hate to ask, but... over the roll or under the roll?  

Does it really matter? I mean, what about sitting on top of the bathroom counter? Then it isn't even on the roll.

Over the last 2 or 3 days I've been monitoring the tracking number for my Dell XPS 700 system that I ordered last week (December 26th, to be exact). I must say, it got here rather quickly, seeing as it was shipped out from the United States, had to go through Canadian customs, and then moved all over Concord, ON for a day.

So much to my delight, when I woke up this morning I checked the tracking number status page - "Location: Dartmouth"; that means it was 2 hours away from where I lived. I called Midland Transport and asked them if they had an estimated time that it would be delivered in the next few days. The kind gentleman on the phone told me that it was already in my town and would be at my house within an hour and a half. Let the excitement begin.

I paced around waiting for them to show up, and I think it was the 10th time I had looked out the window when I seen the great big Midland 18-wheeler sitting outside of my house. I tore up the stairs so fast that I tripped and fell face first onto the floor but that didn't stop me, I was in a great mood.

They brought the package in the house for me and it was huge, and rather heavy to boot. I lugged it down to my bedroom and thats when the real fun began. I took the seal off the box and opened it up to be greeted with a black box with the Dell XPS logo on it. This box had two compartments, one for the keyboard and palm rest (my system shipped with a Dell Enhanced Multimedia USB Keyboard, which works natively in Windows), and the second compartment contained all the software discs, power cords, a Dell XPS CD/DVD case, a Dell XPS mousepad, and a mouse.

After getting this box out of the way you finally get to the system itself, and only one thing came to my mind at the time - "They weren't kidding with the Heavy Ordinance tag-line." I slowly and carefully lifted the machine out of the box, put the feet on it (this helps prevent it from tipping over, and the way the feet fold out remind me of a vehicle in Unreal Tournament 2004 that has those chopping blades that whip out from the sides).

Getting it up and running was a cinch, plugged everything in and turned it on, accepted the EULA, went through the Windows XP Out of the Box experience screens, and then logged in.

I formatted the machine 3 hours later anyway, as I don't use Google Desktop, and Norton Internet Security is a real pain in the rear to completely remove. (Dell, if you ever get around to reading this post by chance, do me a favor - offer a "none" option for Internet Security software, or at least an option to just have the bare operating system and drivers installed and thats it. I mean, really, seeing as the XPS series is your "gaming" class machines, I'd at least like to have this option so that I don't have to go through and format the system - and I'm sure there are many out there that agree with me on this).

The audio quality on this machine is awesome, powered by the all-mighty Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic card. What's really nice is that Dell has taken the time to hook up the front microphone and headphone jack to the sound card so that everything is fully functional. My music collection is being pumped out to my Logitech Z-2300 speaker system with absolute clarity, deep lows, crisp highs, and great mid-range.

After getting everything re-installed, I ran Unreal Tournament 2004 with 8xS Anti-Aliasing and 4x Anisotropic filtering and got an insane FPS rating of ~400. Application launch times simply don't exist, everything is snappy. The system is stable as a rock after running Prime95 and Super PI. Impressed? Hell yes.

I took some photos of the unboxing and I'll take some more later on. Right now, I'm off to enjoy some Unreal Tournament. Whee!

I called Dell a day ago and they told me it would be 48 hours before they would have a tracking number for my Dell XPS 700 system, so I've been keeping a close eye on the Order Status page on their website and much to my delight, there was a tracking number on the page this morning! It should be here within 2 to 3 days, woohoo!

Have you ever gotten into a project that you really feel passionate about and want to just work on it non-stop? Thats where I'm at right now. I've got two web design projects on the go, at the same time to make matters worse. So here I am, with my favorite text editor EditPlus and, thank god because it has tabbed browsing and automatic code coloring, otherwise I'd have a ton of Notepad windows all over my screen.

What keeps me going? Coca Cola. Love the stuff, without a doubt. Between Coke and Popcorn, it's all that keeps me burning that midnight oil working on code.

Now, you might be wondering, what are these two projects? The first project involves Invision Power Board, and let me tell you, IP.Board 2.2 is a royal pain in the keister to style and code with, and the Administration control panel (which we need to use to apply the changes to the theme files) is a pain as well. Trying to code this project so that it works on Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Windows Internet Explorer 7, Opera, and Netscape 8 is not exactly easy.

The second project involves a custom front-end and back-end content management system as well as a small discussion board. I can't talk much about that right now except to say that (hopefully) it's going to blow your mind once we get it out the door. Look for that towards the end of January, I'll be blogging updates etc here regarding that.

December was one heck of a month. I did my Windows Vista presentation at school on the 7th of December, brought my home gaming system in for it and everything. The system was getting a bit old but it still ran decent, it had a Pentium 4 3.00GHz CPU, 1.5GB of DDR PC2700 SDRAM, 250GB PATA hard drive, and a Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro Advantage 256MB Graphics Card.

So, I get to the end of the last presentation of the day. I open up a Windows Explorer window and notice that Windows Aero was horribly slow, it was almost like watching a slide show. At the end of the whole thing I decided to restart the machine to see if I could get it running normally again and much to my surprise it wouldn't boot. I had been having a cold-boot issue with Windows Vista ever since I had upgraded the processor but other than that the system ran fine and it didn't happen with Windows XP. After some diagnostic tests I thought it was a bad power supply, so I ran out and bought a 500W power supply for in the system. But that didn't fix it. So I took the entire system apart, cleaned everything, put it all back together and double triple checked everything, thought I had it fixed. And then the STOP errors started.

After spending 3 hours reformatting and reinstalling Windows Vista, I decided to reinstall Windows XP. After spending a few hours getting everything set back up, the system restarted on its own and then Windows Error Reporting told me that "Windows had recovered from a serious error". My first thought was "Oh ****, something is seriously wrong." Little did I know in a few hours I'd confirm that theory, horribly.

I ran the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool and it found absolutely no errors. So I started the system back up and after 10 minutes it bug-checked (aka "STOP error" or the infamous "blue screen of death") again. I grabbed memtest86+ off the Internet (great tool) and ran it. I was a bit tired so I went and laid down for a few hours, figured I'd let memtest do its thing. I wake up, walk back to my computer and see a whole boatload of memory errors. According to memtest86, it was 17 minutes into the test and had found 3072 errors. One error would have been enough to make me upset. Holy shit! (At this point, my jaw basically hits the floor in shock).

The system board itself (ASUS P4S800, original version) has many issues - including an annoying memory bandwidth limitation which would only allow me to use 1.5GB of RAM at PC2700. If I wanted to go with 2GB, I had to use 2 sticks of 1GB PC2100 or 1 stick of 1GB PC3200 and 2 sticks of 512MB PC2100, which really defeats the purpose because of the slower speed. And I couldn't work with only 1GB of RAM, and 512MB PC2700 isn't too easy to find around here anymore, and I wasn't going to hunt all over the internet for used parts. I've had bad luck with used parts, coincidentally half of that computer was built from used parts and every computer I've owned for the last 5 years was basically built from used or cheap parts - what can you do when you're on a tight budget?

I had to make a decision - spend $500 on a new motherboard and then a dual channel memory kit to go along with it which would only get me a year or so out of the system (Socket 478 system with AGP graphics, it's starting to age); or I could get a new system that would last me at least 3 years. I chose the latter, partially because I didn't want to waste $500 on new parts and then wind up building a new system a year and a half down the road, and partially because, just for once, I wanted to have a decent computer, something that I could truely enjoy every aspect of -- computers and technology are my life.

After much debating and checking out prices, my original plan was to custom build a system with the following specifications:

• Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor
• 2GB DDR2 800 SDRAM (2x1GB Dual Channel Memory Kit)
• 250GB SATA2 Hard Drive
• Antec P180 Case
• 550W Seasonic Power Supply
• NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB Graphics Card

... but, I hit a snag in the plan -- there was no way I would be able to afford the system up-front and I need a decent computer for school next semester. Fortunately, my father and I both receive the Dell Home and Office newsletters in our inboxes and he called from work and asked me if I had gotten mine. After a few days of debating, arguing, and trying to figure some things out, I managed to get my dream system, although I still have to pay it off on monthly payments at least I'll have something to work with now, instead of waiting until August.

Now, I've usually built my systems or had them custom built elsewhere simply because that's "the way I roll", so to speak. I've never been a huge fan of name brand systems (Packard Bell, Gateway, etc), and usually swear against them. So the idea of going with a Dell for my main system was a bit insane foreign to me. I told the system builder half of me to shut up and be happy.

I've had some good luck with Dell, for instance I have two Dell monitors (1707FP UltraSharp 17" LCD) and another 17" (which is just Dell's regular offering that ships with some Dimension systems, can't remember the model number) and neither one of them have a single dead pixel or problem. Absolutely love them. I have two Dell Dimensions, an older 3000 and an E310, which I'm using right now. I've also owned a Dell Latitude C620 and a Dell Inspiron, both of which worked great. On the other hand, I've had a damn near horrible experience with the Dell OptiPlex GX620's at school, lets see... STOP errors, application hangs, random crashes... those things are just horrible, although it may all be caused by the fact that we use Novell for some stupid reason instead of a proper Windows Server based authentication system and Active Directory and/or Group Policy.

Now, for those of you who know me, you know what I put my computer through. For those of you who don't know me, let me just give you a brief summary - a lot of website and graphics design work, gaming, word processing, programming, you name it. I consider myself to be a power user. So, when I looked for a computer to fit my needs as best as possble while still being affordable, we chose Dell. I didn't go for the Dimension or OptiPlex lines and I didn't go with an Inspiron (although I would have if I was looking for a laptop). No. I went straight for the big kahuna.

The Dell XPS 700 Special Edition Formula Red - with some insane specifications to boot. Now, I know the Dell XPS 710 is out, but it is only available with a Quad Core processor, and while that's not a bad thing, I won't take full advantage of it and would rather get my moneys worth out of some other system components.

Without further ado, here are the specifications:

• Special Edition Formula Red Chassis with a 1 KILOWATT Power Supply (can anybody say "overkill"?)
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor
• 4 GB of DDR2 SDRAM
• 320 GB SATA2 Hard Drive (I'll add in another one later if I need more space)
• NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1GB Graphics Card ("SLI on a stick"...)
• Ageia PhysX Accelerator Card (it was free, why not?)
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic (I already own one of these, absolutely love it, selling it though - anyone want it? It's in great condition, very well looked after)
• Genuine Windows XP Professional with re-installation CD

Pretty nuts, right? It only cost me $3,400 before taxes. And it should last me a few years without having to upgrade it much, which is a plus. It should be here either this week or early next week, I'm calling Dell today to find out what the shipping status of it is (their online Order Status page tells me it's shipped... but that doesn't tell me a whole lot). I'm hoping I can get a tracking number or something for it, as I have to be here to sign for it when it arrives as well.

I'll be sure to take lots of pictures, that's for sure.

What are your resolutions/goals for 2007?

1. Get a decent sleeping habit going on... while staying up all night can be fun, it makes you tired like you wouldn't believe... I guess they don't call me "Mr. Insomnia" for nothing.
2. Achieve a decent mark in school - 75% average overall is good enough for me.
3. Stop procrastinating.
4. Enroll in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves.
5. Make some new friends.
6. 1280x1024.