I have building PC’s since ’98 when I put together my first machine.  An AMD K6-2 266mhz with 256mb ram and a 6gb hard drive was a pretty decent midrange PC then.  Irrision, who has written here in the past, actually helped me select the original components and do that first build and I have been a PC convert since.  Typically I don’t do full builds.  I usually just upgrade a few parts here and there, so that original PC that I had upgraded every single components many times over.  I let that go by the wayside a bit for various reasons and ended up with a burnt out system that was for the most part too outdated to move parts over.  (It literally burnt out.  The CPU fan bearings died and the Athlon CPU cooked overnight.)

Since I have a home and work laptop, replacing it hasn’t been the highest thing on the expenditure list.  After I wrote my first review for OCIA.net, I took a look at my setup.  In order to keep reviewing and testing, some upgrades were needed.  After taking a look at what I had on hand to rebuild, I decided it was going to just be easier and more cost effective to do a full build.  So here we are.

But, all of that is really not what were here for.  Which is a tale of an upgrade gone wrong.

About a month ago, I got one of those nasty bugs that it seems a computer will get occasionally.  I thought I got it cleaned off.  Maybe I did and what was left was something else, or maybe it was just a tougher bug than I thought.  Either way, my system was compromised.  I spent about 7 hours (over several days) trying to clean the thing off.  I even pulled the hard drive and brought it to work to scan it as a secondary drive (this is useful because most viruses load into memory on start up, but only if they are on the primary/boot drive), but to no avail.  So, rather than waste even more time trying to clean the thing up, I made sure everything was backed up and started fresh with a format and reinstall.

Once I got the reinstall of Windows Vista done, I went straight to Windows 7 using the upgrade that I had bought for it late last year.  The install/upgrade went incredibly smooth.  In previous versions of Windows, it was always preferable to install the full version of the new OS.  Something about the upgrade process just didn’t work well and you would get some nasty errors.  Windows 7s upgrade process is a bit different.  When you do the upgrade, it gives you the option of doing a format and full install.  Pretty awesome.  Except for the part where I reinstalled Vista first…  oops.

One full install later, and I had a brand new install of Windows 7.  My first impressions were very good.  A lot of the feel of Vista that I had gotten used to, but minus some of the clunky-ness.  Alas, it wasn’t to last.  About a week later, I awoke to a login prompt.  That was weird because I don’t normally log out my home pc.  So, it only gets a login when it restarts.  My first thought, of course, was to think that it was Windows Update that had caused the restart.  Until I came home at lunch and found it at a login prompt again.  [Cut through a couple days worth of technical tinkering]

The machine was set to restart on error.  So, everytime it got a system error, it would reboot.  And, after watching the machine for a while, I discovered that it would get a BSOD after about 20 minutes of idle time.  To shorten the story again, I did diagnostics on everything I could think of to figure out what the BSOD was being caused by.  I gave up after about a week and a half of that.  My assumption is that a update from either Windows or from a hardware related driver replaced a system file of some sort or was causing the problem.  A repair install was no help and I couldn’t do a system restore because it would cause a BSOD if you went into the system restore console.  Once again, I was faced with a format and reinstall.

Luckily, Jake was around to talk some sense into me.  I did the reinstall/restore, but I only went as far as Vista this time.  Perhaps at a later date, I’ll try the upgrade again, but until then, I’m sticking with Vista.  After all, it was pretty stable up until I got whatever I got and had to restore it the first time.  And, maybe, just maybe, Microsoft will fix it with the first Windows 7 service pack.

Either way, I think I’ll likely stick with Vista until the machine needs replacing.  Some of the machines hardware wasn’t just barely good enough for Windows 7, so it might be better to just wait until I need a new machine and get Windows 7 on that.

Authors note: Jake suggested that I should write a post here (somewhat jokingly, I believe) as I’ve largely moved on to other things and Jake has taken full control of this site.  So, I thought I’d call him on his joke and surprise him with a post!  Surprise!  Also, if you like, my blog is over at Thatedeguy.

[tags]HD video, dolphin stadium, daktronics, largest HD video display[/tags]

Seriously folks, here’s a review of the Compaq B2800, which is only available in Asia and Australia. Any Aussies wanna send us one to toy with? Didn’t think so.

With a super slim profile, a 14″ screen, and weighing in at only 4.8 lbs, the B2800 sounds like a pretty serious traveling laptop.

That doesn’t seem to mean that it is a cheapo machine either. Sturdy case design, a 1.7 or 2 ghz Pentium M 740, up to 1.5 gigs of DDR2/533 Ram, and a dedicated graphics card mean this could become a favorite for all around usage. Fan Specs and screen size may limit it from ever being a gamers machine, but for a multi purpose, portable, this one may take a few cakes. Here’s a few snippets from the review to whet your appetite:

The screen is one of the week points of this notebook. For some reason it isn’t a widescreen, but it is true that widescreen have taken a bit longer to be adopted in Asian notebook models, except by Sony. But still, at this day in age they should offer this notebook with a widescreen.

The results are what you would expect from a Pentium M 740 machine. It is much faster than my old Pentium 4 HP notebook and is also a bit more responsive than my AMD Athlon XP 2000+ desktop. It is more than fast enough for nearly anything you would ask of it. If you want further speed you could also buy a faster CPU model like the Pentium M 760.

[tags]compaq b2800, compaq, b2800, ipod, imac, notebook, pentium[/tags]

1. Christian Koster says:

Look, Apple is not entering the Console Game market. Of course they can afford to do it, but they’d lose a lot of money. The 360 and the PS3 are losing money on every console, we know this. Obviously Apple would have to go with a Revolution philosophy, but then why would anybody buy an Apple over the Rev? So then we look at if they did the Home Media center thing and then added a game console feature to it. Well, now we have a computer than can do all the Home media things and can play games. So it will cost as much (or more probably) as a PS3/360 and have the graphics capabilities of a Revolution (or probably less).

And where are the games coming from it. We have seen that a 4th player in the console market never lasts, so somebody would need to go. Now it looks like that could be the 360 (crossing fingers) but if Apple joined the market the support for them would be abysmal. The only way Apple could have done it is if the Revolution tried to be the graphical monster that the PS3 is. Then, Apple could have taken the simple/innovative way (which would have been very convincing like we have seen with OSX and the iPod).

One final paradox: Apple will not enter the console market because they would not succeed if they did. However, if they did enter the market they would succeed.

(Meaning if Apple did enter the market it would be because Jobs saw the magical way to be successful in it, that mere mortals like us could never comprehend until he showed us the light.)
January 5th, 2006 at 1:08 am

Or maybe they are? No one on earth would have believed Apple was going to switch to Intel chips if we had predicted that last year. The console market is going to change a lot in the next couple years. It’s an unfortunate truth that in all likelyhood one of the major players is going to fail and there is a good chance it will be Nintendo.

Furthermore it’s not inconcievable that Apple would consider making console machines but they definately would not do it at a loss. Something Apple is exceedingly good at is selling really nice hardware at a premium price and making a 60% or greater margin on it.

Honestly if Apple applied it’s usual technique to the console market they would dominate over the current major players if merely for the fact that they wouldn’t be losing money on early single console they sold unlike Microsoft and Sony.

Now a niche market that is nearly untapped at this point is the portable gaming market. The Playstation Portable has done surprisingly poor and the Nintendo DS has had meidocre sales until recently. A slick handheld unit with style and good battery life could go a long way in todays market. The PSP looks nice but is huge and clunky while the DS is fairly portable but is ugly and has a bizarre interface that people aren’t taking to (How the hell are you supposed to hold it while using a gamepad and touching another screen at the same time? Grow another arm?).

I think that the biggest possibility for this unlikely entry into the portable gaming fray would probably be a future generation of Ipod. Millions of people already have them and will likely upgrade if the features are right. Supposedly the next gen Ipod is going to have nothing but a huge touchscreen accross it’s entire front so it would be feasible to also ship it with some basic games like tetris. Now what would be even more genius would be that Apple could deliver more games Itunes for a fee instantly. As we’ve learned with the Ipod the convienence of Itunes easily overroad the competition in the hardware market for mp3 players. Apple quickly took 90%+ of the market and continues to hold it to this day.

The only thing in the way of portable gaming on the current Ipod is really just the interface. The click wheel is incredibly annoying to use for games but ideal for navigating mp3s. Now if they were already going to go with a touchscreen it would be quite easy to dynamically change the interface to suit the current application be it playing mp3s/movies or games. The unit is powerful enough to run basic games already and could easily be pumped up to handle better graphics while maintaining Apples high profit margin.

As is typical of Apple they would also try to use the new system as a way to leverage Mac sales through further convienence and coolness factor. With Intel processors running in their entire line by release time for any new Ipod/Console device they would already be set to get a plethora of gaming companies producing for their computer systems as well.

Which brings me to another topic… Why do you think Apple is switching to Intel? Surely it can’t just be cost as it’s a drastic step to take just to cut costs. Jobs is planning on growing Apples’ computer market share. For other than the obvious advantages of more profit it makes sense from a user-base standpoint. The Mac becomes more valuable for Game and Application publishers to release new software onto when it has a larger user-base. It’s the whole reason Apple platform machines are unpopular now. Because they can’t run what the other 90% of the world is running easily. Its the same reason Apple switched to a Unix based OS a couple years ago. They knew Unix would instantly add to the their userbase especially in the nerd category which is probably the most influential on other buying groups. Nevermind the massive amount of opensource software OSx added support for as well.

I merely wanted to point out reasons why our previous speculation could easily be true (Not that it is now of course) and construct a logical reasoning set behind it. Feel free to comment and realize this is all for fun and being right down the road would merely be a bonus for us

I have to say that the utility of thumbdrives completely escaped me for some reason when I bought a 64mb one a year ago. I honestly don’t even know what I did with it but I forgot about it until a couple weeks ago. I’ve so far used mine to transfer files for several clients, install anti-virus/anti-malware apps, carry passwords/wifi keys, and backup documents like my resume so I always have them handy.

A good site that has OpenOffice 2.1 Portable also has quite a few other portable apps. I’m currently just browsing through things but it looks like a really nice resource that I’ll be visiting more in the future. Check out portableapps.com.

While I work on some of above mentioned content why don’t you guys checkout a couple of things I’ve found useful/cool as of late.
TightVNC (Another free VNC remote desktop application similar to openVNC)
MythTV (Setup your own free PVR using an old computer and a tuner card)
Portable CE 2.0 (The man over at Furry Goat gets a nice Windows CE virtual machine running off a USB thumbdrive. I did this on mine at it works great!)

I’d also like to remind everyone to checkout Digital Life TV every Tuesday and Thursday for a good free tech videocast. I also highly recomment “Security Now” and “In the Trenches” podcasts for those of you who aren’t doing anything at work (You know who you are you slackers.. . Stream them if you don’t have an mp3 player you won’t be disappointed. Maybe someday I can con Jake and Shane into helping me do an SGB podcast. In the meantime enjoy these shows and dream about how much better and SGB podcast would be (Just Kidding of course…).

That about wraps it for now keep checking back!