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.

Norton Utilities' Shadow

I decided it was about time that I upgraded my old trusty version of Norton Utilities 2005 with the latest 2009 version. I bought it at my local PCworld shop as it was on offer for just £20. I am totally disappointed with this product which is now just a shadow of its former glory. Thank heaven that I didn't pay any more for it!

Gone are WinDoctor and SpeedDisk, CheckIT diagnostics, boot and run utilities from CD, etc. Instead is an installable and activation for just 3 PCs, which mostly consists of links to Windows own applets for performing system management, tune-up and diagnosis. From DOS days it was always the best set of tools to help you fix PCs. I still enjoy running WinDoctor from the CD on Windows XP systems, finding all the file and registry errors and then running the automatic fixer. It impresses my customers too. Why do the work yourself when you can get the computer to do it for you?

Anyway, I won't be using this latest version. I'll make a backup copy of the CD and put it in my bag just in case. I doubt if I'll be using it much though! Symantec does it again with a totally useless product release of what used to be the king of PC diagnosis and fix software!

Responsive PCs

Yet again I'm drawn to the subject of responsiveness. I've cobbled together a few parts recently and discovered a very responsive system. A Packard Bell minitower with a failed motherboard was the basis. I ordered a new Foxconn i846 chipset motherboard from Novatech for just under £25. Coincidentally a failed Novatech PC with an Intel Pentium 4 3.6Ghz gave me a replacement CPU.

Add 2Gb of PC5400 generic memory from ebuyer and suddenly I realised that I had a fast, responsive minitower computer on my hands. I replaced the Intel stock CPU fan with a cheap Akasa AK-956SF heatsink with fan from ebuyer which lowered the temperatures and noise levels.

This system is only a single core CPU with older technology motherboard, hard drive and memory yet it remains a very responsive computer system. It won't break any benchmarks yet it is still a responsive joy to use.

Cooling IT

As frequencies increase again for multicore CPUs from both Intel and AMD the importance of a good, efficient cooler becomes even more important. Though so called 'stock' air fan coolers that are supplied with the retail versions of modern CPUs are sufficient in cooling their associated CPUs at normal conditions, they are not the quietest or best cooling that can be used if you want to either overclock your processor or build an almost silent system.

I was confronted with both conditions for two different systems recently, one based on an AMD processor and the other an Intel, so I decided to investigate the technology of CPU cooling. There are definitely some weird and wonderful solutions out there including gas and water-based cooling for more money than you would pay for the processor itself. However in the more realistic world of air cooling fans the name of Zaalman was considered the best, but I could not bring myself to purchase beautiful copper cooling solutions for £50 or more when the price of the CPUs they were to cool were not that much more money.

In the region of £15 to £20 the name of Arctic Cooling came to the front, so I purchased one of these to try. I was amazed how much cooler and quieter the Intel system was! I quickly purchased the AMD version of the Arctic Cooler Freezer aluminium cooler. These seem the optimum price/performance solution as the CPU temperature and noise level dropped considerably when they were installed. Thoroughly recommended!