June 30th, 2008

Alienware. Best Computers Ever?

Posted by Robin Thomas in Computer

Established in 1996, Alienware has become a very successful company. Alienware has built a good name for itself with it’s sleek, and very stylish computers. 

Alienware's AuroraAlienware’s Aurora is the cheapest desktop they have starting from $999 or as low as $30 a month. Operating systems for Aurora is Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate.  Single hard drives are 7,200 RPM (Up to 32MB cache and 1 TB storage) and 10,000 RPM (Up to 16MB cache and 300GB storage). For networking the Wired Connectivity is Dual Integrated Gigabit Ethernet RJ-45. Audio is 7.1/5.1 Digital High-Defenition. About the case: Alience 3.0 high-performance cooling, standard lighting systems, standard 750-watt Multi-GPU approved power supply, tooless front and side panels, height 19.01″, width 9.97″, depth 25.02.

m9750 This is Alienware’s M9750 notebook. The operating system for the M9750 is Windows Media Center, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Home  Premium, and Windows Vista Ultimate. Processors, chipset, and memory consist of Intel Core 2 DUO Processors ( 4MB cache, 667MHz FSB); Intel 945PM + ICH7M-DH chipset; up to 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 at 667MHz; 2 dedicated SO-DIMM slotsfor Dual Channel DDR2 memory.  The graphics and videos are 512MB NVIDIA GeForce8700M GT GDDR3 (single graphic card) .

As you can clearly see Alienware computers are magnificent. If you’d like to know more about Alienware computers or purchase one please visit alienware.com.

 

April 16th, 2008

My Computer

Posted by Cooltrainer Josh in Computer

Hey so like I reached a standstill on making this thing for insuficient funds (literally I owed the bank a ton of money, and my tax return barely covered it… :( I was planning on using the tax return {am I a traitor to say thank you US govt?}), so I won’t be getting those hard drive now… so here’s the rig as is, and has been for the past 7 weeks;

Nvidia Nforce520-le Socket A MB

AMD Athlon 4.8 GHZ CPU x64 Dual core 2.4s I assume, Brisbane core

Nvidia Budget-Model 7300 gt 512 MB graphics card

Apevia X-plorer case

2 gigs system RAM (1 gig G. Skill, 1 gig Kingston)

OS: Windows XP SP2 Pro w/Vista Inspirat

Drives:

1 WD 10 GB hard drive

1 WD 320 GB hard drive

1 DVD-RW SH-S203 drive

2x floppy drives, usually disconnected, looking for a copy of MS-DOS for floppy.

Pics:

Lost about 4 pints of blood assembling case, it has those stupid sealed-shut expansion slots with no clip-on or screw-in lockdown slots… so, your cards just dangle in there… I just knocked them all out and put some mesh over the holes.

April 10th, 2008

Thermaltake Shark Case

Posted by Eric Hamby in Computer
When the thermaltake shark case went on sale around november 2004 it wasn’t long before i had my hands on one. After 4 years here is my review.

The first thing you noticed about this case is that it don’t have a windows on the side, it just got mesh over the “gills”. This may not seem like a big deal now days but in 2004 it was one of the first. What this meant however is that if your computer was currently kinda loud in its current case, you was going to have to be a handyman to figure out a way to keep the noise down in the shark case. most people solved this by going and getting a more silent cpu fan. The case didn’t come with a lot of extra slots for case fans so this also keep things quite. The case was more or less made for water cooling and i don’t think they had fans in mind when designing it. But since i really like my computers loud i didn’t really see this has a downside. One of the few downsides to me was the lack of fan spaces. With one 120mm space at the front and another 120mm at the back, 2 fans was max without modifying the case. Another downside for me came to me because i have a lot of hard drives in all my computer. The case has four hard drive slots but after you get the case open you release that has with most newer cases there mounted sideways which means only sata drives can be used there. You can use ide but you have to use the old school flat cables and even then if you have more than two drives its not easy. All my ide cables are round so using the four slots for my ide drives was impossable. So i installed 4 sata drives there and decided to get a CM Stacker adapter to fit the ide hard drives up in the 5.25 bays. Luckily the case comes with 5 5.25 bays so you have room for 4 hard drives and one optical drive. So after it was over i had my case there with 8 hard drives and 1 optical drive. the next thing it needed was lights. So i went for 4 uv lights to make the green ide cables glow. The whole case comes in at 14lbs and is all aluminum. After 4 years i am still just as satisfied with the case has i have ever been. I have a few other cases i plan to write a review on later on but since i have had this one the longest i thought i would start with this one.
April 10th, 2008

CM Stacker 830 Evolution Case

Posted by Eric Hamby in Computer

About a year ago i was building a new systems and needed a very, very large case. After a few weeks of research i found myself choosing between the Lian Li V2000 and the CM Stacker 830 Evolution. I after a good week of thinking on it put in the order for the CM Stacker. The Stacker has always gotten great reviews and the whole Stacker line is just a great product. I also chose the Stacker because i haven’t been to fond of Lian Li products. There has always been soemhting about there cases that, just didn’t seem like they was worth the money you paid.

About a week later my case arrived and having never seen one in person i was amazed by the size of the box it came in. Thinking it was all just padding and parts i just figured that the case would indeed be a lot smaller… it wasn’t. There is no getting around it, this case is massive. It is in fact one of the widest cases i have ever seen. With a width of almost 10 inches (9.8) this is a very wide case. Even just seeing the numbers you don’t really understand how big it is till you open it up and look at all the room inside of it. It has room for 9 120mm fans and a very nifty rail systems for the hard drives and cd drives. All together it has 9 5.25 external bays with a hard drive bay that sides into any 3 5.25 slots which holds 4 hard drives. Something else i love about this case is its atx and btx conversions. It accepts both formats but if you get the need to be a little different you can turn the mother board tray over and make your atx motherboard look like a btx being as it will all be on the left side. The motherboard tray is another marvel with this case, since the motherboard trey is also the back panel so its a lot easier to get out than most. The front panel will adjust to open from the right side or the left side which comes in handy depending on your desk setup. The power supply bay may be adjusted to mount your power supply upwards or downwards for better airflow.
It claims to be screw less but its not really, to get the hard drive adapter and move it up or down the 5.25 rails you have to unscrew it.

The side panels seem to be cheaply made with the very thin metal and can be a pain to get back on. Some of the plastic parts are very cheaply made, but overall the case is very well made and very sturdy. The optimal wheels that come with it are very nice to have since this is not a light case. the case will be quite heavy by the time you get everything in it, so i wouldn’t recommend putting it on top of your desk which you would have to have a very large desk to put it there.

Overall i am very happy with this case. When i build a computer the case is one of my most important things since i love it to look great but perform very well to. This case far exceeded my expectation… but i wouldn’t buy another one if i was buying one for space. For space you still cant beat the V2000 from Lian Li. but for enjoyment and modifying i would go back with this case.

April 3rd, 2008

Flash-based Hard Drives - The future is so 5 minutes ago.

Posted by Cooltrainer Josh in Computer

http://www.popsci.com/gear-gadgets/article/2008-03/how-it-works-sturdiest-solid-state-storage

Wow. Flash-based Hard Drives are already on the market? I’m impressed. Now might be a good time to invest in a laptop…

March 26th, 2008

Oh Nooes!

Posted by Cooltrainer Josh in Computer

Guys… sorry I’ve been gone lately. K.I.N.G., my 320 gigabyte hardrive, just died a few days ago, and damn… I lost all of my stuff… I won’t be able to get online much anymore.

March 18th, 2008

HD-DVD Or Blu Ray? Voodoo Chooses Both

Posted by Eric Hamby in Computer
With the war raging between Alienware and Voodoo each company is trying to do everything they can to have the edge and offer something that the other just cant. A few years ago this was very hard for them to do becouse of the limited budjet these companies had it took months and years for the to develop somehitng to get
that edge. now that the Aliens have been abducted by Dell and VoodooPC has been sold to HP these 2 companies have now got all the money they want to just “play”.
Voodoo’s latest achievment is to make avalible the first ever optic drive that will play both HD-DVD and Blu Ray DVD, somehting that isnt even avalalible on stand alone DVD players. The only draw back is that even though the drive will be able to burn a Blu Ray disk it wont yet be able to burn HD-DVD wich im guessing Alienware is already working on to get there edge back. Dont forget that for a Voodoo pc your looking at a price range of $5,000-$20,000 for there Omen desktop.
March 16th, 2008

Networking

Posted by Cooltrainer Josh in Computer

I was wondering if it is possible to network two computers together on one modem? Eric, you know my specs, it’s my old computer and new one, the modem is a westel wirespeed dual connect modem… I try to get the internet on both simultaneously with one using the ethernet port, the other using usb, but it won’t work; then I tried running the usb from my modem to one computer, and the ethernet simply between the two computers; this layout didn’t work either.

Is it possible to get the internet on two computers using only one modem, a usb cable and ethernet cable? Thanks.

March 13th, 2008

CreAtive

Posted by Cooltrainer Josh in Computer

NO!!!

DEMON!!!

NO!!!

THE ONE THING I HATE MORE THAN INTEL PROCCESSORS!!!!

I’ll explain the meaning behind that rant.

I bought a sound card for my old computer when I couldn’t play guild wars for not having a good card; it was Creative. Okay.

IT INSTALLED NO LESS THAN 18 THINGS ON MY START MENU, AND ADDED 8 START-UPs, AND 5 BACKGROUND PROCESSES.

Bought a Creative Webcam a while later, because it got great reveiws. EVEN WORSE, ABOUT 37 START MENU PROGRAMS, AND 19 BACKGROUND PROCESSES - WHEN IT’S NOT EVEN HOOKED UP.

I HATE CreAtive, corporate whores.

March 13th, 2008

The Cell

Posted by Cooltrainer Josh in Computer

I beleive this was the processor for the PS3, but I think this article was very interesting… think we’ll be seeing these (or something similar/equivilant to) offered for desktop computers sometime?

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28microprocessor%29

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