Jonathan Davies

So I’m going to build a PC…

Building a Pc is something that I have wanted to do for a long time. Though I really enjoy my mac, I have missed one thing about switching. Games. I know, I can install BootCamp (which I have) and have a play there, but frankly the MacBook Pro isn’t the best gaming machine around.

So I thought I would join gaming and building a PC together and build an “average” gaming machine. I am not going to have a massive budget, and I don’t want what ars-technica would cool the “God Box” but I want a machine that will run games well for a while. My budget is £650 not including monitor which should be enough to build what I want.

Just so you know, I am a total n00b about building a PC so I need your help in getting it done and some recommendations. Luckily my IT teacher Mr Leigh is willing to help me, but it doesn't mean that you can’t too! So send an email you use the contact form or even comment!

So here are the specs that I’m looking at getting:

Motherboard:   Gigabyte P35-DS3P socket 775 motherboard - £90

This seems like a reasonably priced motherboard, it supports Core 2 Duo and Quad chips and Vista. It has plenty of inputs and of course supports Vista.

CPU:    Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 socket 775 processor 2.4GHz - £160

I was very impressed with the the price of this processor at only £160 it seems to be future-proof. It has a high clock speed and of course those powerful four cores. But… I could, for the same price, get a dual core 3GHz CPU. Which is better?

Case:   Enlight EN-4102 ATX case - £42

The case looks pretty good and is screw-less so I can get at it easily. It has plenty of drive bays (5). And of course it meets the ATX standard.

GPU:   XFX GeForce 8800GTS 320Mb PCI-Express graphics card £190

I think that this is one of the more important components for the PC as I am leaning towards gaming. I thought that the price was fair and the card should last me a fair amount of time.

The Other Stuff:

4×1GB sticks. It looks like I am going to be running Vista on the machine and I know that it is a RAM hog so I thought I would make good use of the cheap price of £56. I am going to start off with a 250GB hard drive and expand over time. That should set me back about £44. Then I am going to get a simple NEC optical drive for £20.

All in all that costs me about £600 that leaves me with a hundred odd quid to buy the OS keyboard and mouse and anti-virus software. I am going to be buying a 24” Dell monitor soon that I will use with the PC.

What do you think? Would you change any of the components? If so, why?

I’ll be the first to admit it, my first experiences over the last few months with my Mac haven’t been perfect, but who has found them so? I thought I’d blog about this issue and maybe get your advice on it and as to what my next course of action should be. About a month ago I was sitting in Biology and found that my keyboard on my MacBook Pro wasn’t working. Not any button on the whole thing. The only way I found out that it was working was by continuously hitting the caps-lock key and waiting for the light to turn on. So after a few seconds it came back on and I went back to typing; worry free. It must have just been a glitch. Right? Well about a week later the problem came back big time. I though the keyboard had failed, it didn’t come back to life for about ten minutes. And when it did it was hardly for long. This repeated itself all evening and then in the morning it was fine. So now I am at my whit’s end. This problem is driving me crazy as it seems to lure me into a sense of false security and then hit me with another problem. I think it might be a hardware problem as the problem survived a Leopard install (though it was only an upgrade). If I plug in a keyboard everything works fine. So any suggestions? I think in the end it might be more prudent to take it into the shop that I purchased it from. I just wish that I had this problem a bit later when the new MBPs come out. The retailer (not Apple) from what I have heard have a habit of just replacing the machine!

Everyone uses Twitter don’t they? Or at least you’ve all heard of it. The whole idea is that you post “what you are doing” for friends or people who are just interested in what you are doing. But there are many other ways you can use Twitter - here is five.

New Blog Post! -

I do this a lot. Whenever I have written a new blog post I always tweet about it. When I look at my google analytics I can see that about a quarter of the people who visit my blog come through Twitter. Some stay, some don’t but it really helps getting some more exposure.

WTF? -

Another really cool way of using Twitter is by making a link blog. You scour the net looking for stuff that interests you, but maybe doesn’t merit a whole bog post about it. Here is a good example of one: link.alicio.us

Conversation -

Want to get some questions answered then put it out to the Twitter community and they can help, these are real conversation starters but be warned, the 140 character limit might make you want to revert back to email or go to Pownce.

Notices -

Going away for a week and don’t really want those hundred or so emails pouring in, then let everyone know through your Twitter feed. Once again this might not be suitable for a blog post but is great for Twitter.

Polls -

Want to see what most of the Twitter community is thinking? Then put out a poll and find out! Most of the time if they are following you they tend to have the same interests. Here is an example: What do you think Google will buy next?

So there you are, five different ways that you can enjoy Twitter and get a lot more out of it. Do you use Twitter in a different way? If so leave a comment or use the contact form!

Yes it's the triumphant return of Weekly Wallpaper! This week the image is of the view from my house's garden in the early morning.

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I recently purchased a 500GB LaCie drive from Amazon.co.uk for use with Time Machine. the drive was £125 (US$250) and came with a quadruple interface. In other words Firewire 400, 800, ESATA and USB. The main reasons I chose this drive was that they design was very sleek and did not get in the way and the fact that they have a FW800 which would save me yet another USB port.

When I first set the drive up I was immediately greeted with a churning sound within the drive. I’m guessing that this sound is the spindle, and its loose (just so you understand this is a guess, I don’t know to much about hard drives). I do know however that this sound is not meant to be there as my friend Rupert just purchased one through my Amazon link (bellow!) and it is not making the same sound. So far nothing really bad has happened to the drive and I haven’t had any data loss, but I am going to LaCie a ring for a couple of reasons one. The product has obviously got something wrong with it and I guess could fail at any time and the sound is driving me insane.

So I’m going to phone up LaCie this weekend, the drive is at home, and ask them what’s up.

In short, I got a lemon.

As you all know I bought a MacBook Pro a few months ago and have been loving it but lately have been having some really frustrating keyboard issues. Basically I will be typing away and then it stops, nothing works. When I press the caps lock key the light does not turn on and nothing else works. After a short period of time it comes back to life and goes on normally, but I can’t afford for it to fail me, as it already has, in lessons. Unfortunately it is going to be hard to show it to the guys in the store as it is so intermittent.

In short, I think my MacBook Pro is a bit of a lemon (not a whole one!)

Have you had any issues with products that you bought lately? Answer by leaving a comment or using the contact form!

I can’t say that Leopard has changed the way I work with Spaces. This is because before Leopard I was using the application Virtue Desktops (which is no longer in development). I was very happy with it and it did almost everything that I wanted it too - and in fact in many ways it trumps Spaces. You may now ask, why did I change to Spaces? One word. Integration. It works flawlessly with Mac OS X and all the applications. I found some glaring and frustrating problems with Virtue Desktops which made my yearn for Leopard stronger.

One thing that attracted me to the idea of extra desktops in the first place was that only having 15” of desktop and finding myself running about six apps, sometimes more, all at once it had become a juggling act keeping them arranged. With spaces I have virtually quadrupled my desktop to 60” and have the capability to have up to 240”! However even with this I am still looking in to a 30” display.

Here is how I use Spaces:

I have fours “spaces”, one for Mail Twitterific and Pownce (when it works). In this space I communicate with everyone over the internet (email) and check what people are up too (Twitterific and Pownce). I then have a second window used for web browsing. I have both Safari and Firefox going at once most of the time (it’s a long story why). I then have a third space for word processing and nothing else, in that space I can stay focused on my goal and not get distracted. And finally I have the forth space for iTunes where I can quickly jump to if I want to listen to something else.

One of the other cool ideas that Apple has taken into account is the ability to assign spaces to an application. One of the main things that happened with Virtue Desktops is that I would accidently swap them, so assigning Spaces really helps

Here is how I’d like to use Spaces:

Though spaces is very cool, there are a few nagging things about it. Some may say that these are features but they frustrate me. If I have not set an app for a space and I want to change it I can’t minimize it and then open it into a different space, if I do that then it goes back to the original space. I have to close the open window and then open it in the new space.

Conclusions:

Spaces is a program that I will use. However it is a feature that I wouldn’t go out and show someone, I would show Time Machine though (more on that soon). There is no reason that you shouldn’t use it in Leopard, but it isn’t an app that I would go out and buy.

Have you used Spaces? What do you think? Leave a comment or use the contact form!

So yet another month has come and I have managed (some how) to churn out some posts that I am very happy with and would like to share with you. So take a look and enjoy!

Where is Social Networking Going? -

I wrote this post when Google acquired a site I use called Jaiku, I talked about how this seems to fit into big picture at Google.

The iPhone SDK a sign of Mac OS X weakness’? -

I seem to have benn the only one who found anything bad about Apple’s excuse about iPhone apps, read it and tell me in the comments if you agree or not!

Why I Love and Hate Skype -

I wrote about my feelings towards one of the most popular applications, used for VOIP and how it changed the way I communicate.

The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store: Flawed Perfection-

I wrote about my thoughts on one of the biggest leaps Apple has made, on the iPod Touch and iPhone.

Did you have a post on my blog that you enjoyed? Tell us, by leaving a comment or using the contact form!

So as you probably will have guessed by the title; Leopard has arrived and has been installed. I thought in this blog post I would talk about my upgrade experiences. I had always planned to do just a simple upgrade as my machine was still pretty new, I am glad I did as any of the other choices most likely would have been wasted as everything seems so far to have come out of the upgrade perfectly!

Back-up, Back-up, Back-up!  -

This is what I was doing for just over an hour after getting Leopard and the Hard Drive. I used SuperDuper to make a drive back-up just in case anything went wrong - luckily nothing did. Unfortunately after getting about half way I had to stop and move somewhere else. After that was done I was ready to go onto the install.

Welcome to Mac OS X Leopard -

So I inserted the disk and restarted, after hearing that Leopard can get confused if you have an external hard drive attached I promptly detached it when the machine booted. Like you do, I went through all the choices and the agreements till I came to the choose hard drive to install… This is where I hit a little problem - it would not detect my drive, it sat there for ages doing nothing. The solution? I restarted the install and (as Steve Jobs would say) boom! It was showing my 120GB internal hard drive.

Hello! -

It only took about forty minutes for the Leopard install and once it was I was ready to play around with the new OS and have been, check out the blog for some more updates in my “Experiences with Leopard” series!