Harsh J

19th August 2009 marked the first death of my reliable P4-based PC. A huge power surge, coupled with the fact that I’d been using it for three years without a UPS lead to its demise. The SMPS conked off, and so did the board; a capacitor in both leaked. And there went my plans of waiting for an i5 based upgrade. In the past 5 years I’ve grown from being addicted to the PC to being dependent on it, and I needed a replacement to continue my daily tasks.

After realizing the board had leaked and was the reason of random boot issues even after replacing the SMPS that very day, I started to decide which is of more value to me – a laptop or a PC itself? The desire for a large screen, plus the cost of a properly customized Dell Studio 15 helped push a PC as the winner.

A round of inquiry later I had my configuration ready to be purchased.

• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz (E7500, Wolfdale) Processor
• Intel DG41RQI Essential Desktop Board
• Transcend 2 GB DDR2 800 MHz RAM
• Seagate 500 GB 7200rpm SATA II HDD
• Samsung DVD-RAM 22x ODD
• Zotac Nvidia GeForce 9600GT PCI-E 2.0 Graphics Card
• Zebronics 500W Platinum PSU
• Logitech Internet Desktop KB/Mouse Combo
• Numeric 600 KVA UPS and a black cabinet to engulf all of the above with style.

Got the PC assembled by the dealer, since they had a policy to test the products you buy before they bill it. The total damage was 24,000 INR. Ironically, I haven’t bought a good display yet. Though the budget was extensible to around 35k, I decided to give a two or three month gap before buying a large 22″ or 24″ display, in hopes of better specs and price. For now, its back to the good ol’ SyncMaster 793DF from Samsung. Funnily, the market had only two C2Ds to choose from – E7400 or E7500 (Price difference of 200 INR).

Now am off to try out 64 bit stuff, a desire I’ve had for 3 long years! Ain’t gonna benchmark this, since the results will only be average

With the onslaught of these micro-blogging sites I just can’t think of writing anything more than 140 characters. I’ve tried posting a digest of the same in the blog every week just to keep it going here but it does not look so neat. The Lifestream plug-in, now in action at one of my pages, keeps track of most of the 2.0 updates while I try to bring myself back to posting proper web logs.

With the model exams over, I have about a month’s holidays to prepare for the 6th semester exams. Too much time, probably cause I listen in the classes. This semester was pretty good compared to the five before since it had two programming and one cryptography topic accompanied with some mathematics to keep the dullness taking over. I don’t know what they’ve chosen as electives for the next semester, but I do know that learning Compilers and related topics at college has nil possibility now. I can learn things myself but I don’t always have that discipline required, hence the sadness of not being taught.

I’ve decided to merge here, the PyQt blog I have running over at WordPress.com. I’ve not posted much there, and think that it will be better off at my own blog. Will be posting the existing posts one at a time. Qt 4.5 brings in quite a lot of performance boosts and their blog is very active these days with new concepts/features being put up almost every week. Thank you Nokia!

I also upgraded my Ubuntu from 8.10 to 9.04 flawlessly. The updater’s config-file diff warning notices need to have more options since it blocks the update process; an editor should do well. Jaunty Jackalope, as it is called this time, has good updates like OpenOffice.org 3 (Took long enough), Qt 4.5 (Wonder how KDE4 would perform on this one), Python 2.6 (Deprecation warnings, yum). A lot of other updates are present too, I just mentioned the ones I cared about.

One of my cabinet fans started making very loud droning noises and it made my temper flare quite a few times. I literally punched it, hard. The everlasting dust issue also started to seek attention again and I had no choice but to sit down, yet again, and clean the CPU off its dust. The graphic card had quite a lot of dust collected upon it this time, and that was the reason why the computer whined when I played a graphic-intensive game. After cleaning off the cabinet using an air-blower, I detached the side fans and after discovering that they had a secret compartment beneath the sticker I gave it some oiling.

It does not make much noises now, except for a few audible scratches when my Prescott is really hot trying to run the VisualBoy Advance at 400% throttle. Peace in my small room, at last. I’m losing patience on this 4 year old machine and I have probably mentioned that a hundred times. Yet I can’t seem to take a decision and buy a newer PC, and I don’t know why. The only things am sure about right now is on getting a 22-inch monitor and half a terabyte of secondary storage with two or four gigabytes of primary memory thrown in. The processor and the motherboard, however, are still delaying my decision with new ones coming in every other month. I’m dying to dive into the upgrade pool.

Having, at least, three weeks of free time I decided to get myself the Spider-Man’s Web of Shadows game. It does lack in performance but has some cool moves, like the last movie game did. I also want to play the Broken Sword series again but I don’t think I’ll find time to do that. For now, let’s just swing with the symbiotic.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve done in the past three days. More as they come.