Archive for March, 2006:

It appears that the good weather is lasting! Thursday we had a nice and sunny day here in Lincolnshire, though Friday was dull and wet.

Yesterday we received some more sun, along with a bit of heat. Though there were some light showers during the afternoon. Today it has been more of the same - a nice warm breeze with the sun to accompany it. We had a light shower earlier, but everything’s just right now.

I could be the next Michael Fish…

I don’t know if it’s my IT Monkey brain that’s losing some valuable cells, or if it’s just that I’m finding new problems that I’m having to use old-skool methods to solve…

I built a new PC for work, which will be used primarily for Video Editing and recording Digital TV, along with burning the video(s) to DVD.

Due to the new Premiere Elements requiring an SSE2 processor, I had to opt for an Athlon64 - but I’m not complaining. To complement it, I chucked in 2 sticks of 1gb RAM, along with a 6600LE, 120gb SATA NCQ, and a decent 380w silent PSU from Tagan. To handle the Digital TV aspect, I added a DVB-T USB stick, complete with decent recording software.

After setting it all up, and getting it to POST successfully, I proceeded to install XP. Then once it was working, I added on a few drivers and restarted. Then it froze - on the XP Splash Screen.

After an hour or two of trying everything I could think of, and searching a few forums, I realised it had to be driver related. A recent reply from a forum has confirmed it’s the nforce 4 IDE driver playing up, as they’re pretty dodgey.

So that should be sorted on Monday. But it’s taken me a lot longer than usual to rectify.

The same occurred with Anneka’s AOpen SFF computer. I tried installing my DVB-T USB stick to watch digital TV on her computer, and the output was terrible compared to my laptop. After watching Adamskii’s Demozone video on it, I realised it wasn’t just the digital stick, but all video output. Me and Simon put it down to codecs, but a re-install of them didn’t solve it, but it did corrupt the DVD playback.

So I’m currently formatting and re-installing XP and a few programs on it.

Formatting isn’t ideal, as it’s generally quite time-consuming. But my IT Monkey brain likes the odd format here and there to keep it ticking…

Adamskii has finished his second video for his uber-kool Demozone review site.

Go take a look here.

And will someone please give him a job? All this video editing and games talent is being wasted, well mostly - some is being put to good use in Demozone.

Dell have released their XPS 600 Renegade PC today, at a huge $9930!

Why? It’s the world’s first Quad-SLi PC, with 4 x 7900 cards (slightly underclocked GTXs); a factory clocked, 4.26GHZ Intel Pentium EE Dual Core; Dual 160gb Raptors in RAID 0; along with the usual (2gb RAM; 400gb storage drive…).

It also includes a custom paint job from what looks like some hill-billy, who’s famous in America for painting:

So a bit like Rolf Harris then.

Rumours are that Dell have only made 30 of them, and they’ll all be sold be Lunchtime today.

Official Dell page here.

This morning I went to feed the fish, to feed the fish; to feed the fish (say it in a tuneful way).

However, when I lifted the lid of the tank, I found the Glass fish, and Shark fish had both died - as they were floating sideways on the surface of the water…

Now I know our water is OK, as we’ve taken samples to the Pet shop and they’ve confirmed it’s clean. And we feed them twice a day as required. So I’ve put it down to bullying, as Simon’s two new fish are still alive, and they’re the same fish type as one of the veterans of the tank.

From the evidence, I think we have a clear case here for murder, with the 3 Guarami’s the murderers.

So let’s stop this bullying at once, and put the remaining fish up for trial…