Personal stereo

For my forthcoming trip to Canada and USA, I decide to update my iPod with my latest albums. That all went well, but the sound through the iPod headphones seemed to be a bit poor. I researched it a bit and the comparison between a Ferrari and a Fiat caught my eye for the Sennheiser CX500 ear-buds. A good price of £18 at play.com was the decider.

What a difference! The bass sound was lower yet clearer, the mid-tones crisper and my 58 year old ears could determine the higher frequencies better. I didn't seem to turn them up as much and the noise isolating ear-canal grommets should keep the airplane jet drone away. I was satisfied with my purchase. My old 2Gb iPod Nano had a new lease of life, though the capacity was a little limited in trying to fit all my favourite albums into it.

So on a recent visit to the PCworld shop a Sansa Clip 2Gb for only £10 seemed a cheap way to allow me an alternative album selection. It is a great little MP3 player, and also sounds great through my new ear-bud headphones. The only problem I have with it is managing the playlist as it wants to play all the tracks alphabetically and not in album/track order. Apparently you can change this through Windows Media Player, so I'll play with this a bit more.

Anyway a new great-sounding portable personal stereo for just £28, not bad!

Windows 7

The parts for my Windows 7 PC arrived this week. Unfortunately the Pentium 4 3.4GHz CPU that I hoped to use was non-responding, so I had to use a 3GHz instead. With all the messing about I bent the pins in the LGA775 socket which required some delicate adjustment. Then the CPU cooler didn't remain firmly clamped to the motherboard, the CPU overheated and the PC promptly shutdown.

The 1Gb DDR2 memory gave errors at 667MHz (the slowest speed the motherboard would accept) and had to be replaced. Finally the older DVD player and writer drives wouldn't accept the 16X DVD that I'd burnt with Windows 7 RC1 on it. I had to burn another with 8X media. What a hassle! It all took hours to build into a successful, working system.

I'm enjoying the Windows 7 experience now, even running on just 1Gb memory. I have ordered an additional 2Gb anyway. I downloaded the Kaspersky AntiVirus Beta for this version of Windows and protection will last to the end of the year. By which time I will have hopefully upgraded to the released version. And I'll probably replaced the CPU with a multi-core midrange processor like the Pentium E6300.

I like the Windows 7 task bar with the Internet Explorer and Media Player icons in what used to be called the quick launch area. You definitely get more feedback on what programs are doing, downloading, waiting for input, stacked, etc. I don't really want to download Live Photo Gallery and Live Windows Mail on every installation that I do as the Windows versions are missing. As is Windows Movie Maker.

The Windows Paint and Wordpad are still delivered, but have been upgraded with a new user interface. I'll have to check whether there is additional functionality as well. I'll also have to look at the new Homegroup and Libraries as I've heard good reports about them, though you apparently can't integrate Windows XP or Vista systems into them.

I've ended up with a nice quiet system which is a bit slower than I'd had hoped for but will do to play around with the software on. The Chieftec Mesh case looks really good though, solid and shows the quality.

Here I go again....

I've one it again. Why? I've bought a new case and motherboard for a DIY computer. I must be mad!

It is Chieftec Mesh mini tower case with 350W power supply for just £45 from ebuyer. I've used Chieftec cases before and found them solid, reliable, quality cases with a good design. I'm writing this on a metallic purple, full tower Chieftec Matrix case which is presently in its second resurrection.


I've also added an Asus microATX motherboard (Asus P5KPL-AM iG31 Socket 775) to the order to house the Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz CPU that I have going spare. Add 1Gb DDR2 memory, a second-hand 200Gb SATA disk drive, a DVD writer plus a new ATi Radeon HD3450 graphics card that I liberated from a recent DELL purchase and I have the basis of a reasonable PC.

Now, all I need is an operating system. Well, Microsoft's new Windows 7 RC1 will run for a year, give me the opportunity to play with it and possibly upgrade to the full version when it'll be fully released later this year. That'll do fine.

So, here we go again with DIY PC. Why do I bother when I have a new DELL Vostro 220 minitower sitting in a box here? It has an Intel Pentium E5200 CPU, 2Gb DDR2 memory, DVD writer and a 250Gb hard disk drive. Windows Vista, keyboard and mouse plus one year's warranty for just over £200. I must be mad!

Catastrophic failure

I got this error message recently when I was trying to install Windows Live. It is good to see that programmers at Microsoft still have a sense of humour.