For our first installment of “Item of the Week” we have a PC Power & Cooling (henceforth, PCPC) Silencer 750 watt power supply. I bought this sucker to replace my Silverstone Zues, mainly because I wanted to have a single-rail system with enough power to drive single-GPU rigs for some time coming.
The PCPC Silencer fit the bill and for a mere $91 (after MIR and promo code) at Newegg, who could beat the deal?
So I’ve wanted a laptop for some time now. Like most things I want, I didn’t want to actually buy it so I have been putting it off for about a year now. This year at school I am taking some security classes that are in an airgapped room. The catch is that you can get the school’s wifi in the room if you bring your own equipment (and promise not to plug it in to the room’s network on pain of failure of all classes that use the security lab).
A few weeks ago I picked up a $1200 HP. I was planning on using it as my full time computer as it was more powerful (I thought) than my existing machine (c2d, 4gb, 9600m gt). Well apparently I failed at reading reviews/benchmarks or they lied to me, as the 9600m gt barely outperformed my 7900gs (17 points on 3dmark06). On top of that I was having some strange issues with the sound and the “media buttons” (which are really like a touchpad of some sort) acting oddly. Since HP offers full money back guarantees (and pays return shipping, and shipping to me was free) back to HP it went, quite painlessly. Even though I wasn’t sold on their product, their return policy is pretty damn nice.
About a week ago, a buddy linked me to a slickdeals post about the Acer Extensa 4420-5963. $399 at Best Buy.
So my supervisor wanted to do some preliminary testing of our product on Windows Server 2008 on some spare machines, Dell 1750′s to be specific. One problem, no DVD drives and the 1750′s don’t boot from USB. He tried just installing on another machine and ghosting onto the 1750 but ran into problems due to the PERC4/Di raid controller on the 1750.
I didn’t really want to set up the full Vista/2008 deployment system, so my first attempt was to install on another machine and just load the PERC4/Di driver when given the option during install (You have to uncheck the “hide drivers that aren’t for this system” option). Apparently at some point during the install it purges the driver if it doesn’t need it, so it just BSODed after ghosting to the 1750. I thought of a possible workaround the other day and finally got around to trying it today. Right after you load the additional storage drivers it reboots before finishing the installation. I grabbed the image during that reboot and let the install finish on the 1750 successfully. This should work on any system in a similar situation.
After updating the kernel on my Fedora 8 box, I was greeting by VMware Server failing to load. I figured now would be a good time to try out 2.0 RC 1. I had read that it was a fair bit different and that they had done away with the console client in favor of a web based client so I was interested in seeing if there were any major new features. After downloading the 1.0.5 tarball (again) to get and run the uninstall script (which does not delete your virtual machines) I was ready to go.
My new quad-core setup arrived on Monday and, after installing it, I took a few pictures. For those with similar setups, wondering if it fits, it indeed does. Here are my specs to-date for people who are trying to compare:
Case: Coolermaster Centurion 532
CPU: Intel Q6600 G0 @ 3.0ghz
RAM: 2x2gig OCZ Platinum DDR2 1066
HDD:
PSU: Silverstone Zeus 650w
DVD: Some Sony DVDRW drive
Video: EVGA 8800GT 512mb PCI-E 2.0
Sound: Creative Audigy 2 ZS
Motherboard: Biostar TSeries TP45 HP
Just placed an order on Newegg to step up to a quad-core processor and four gigs of RAM. Here is the complete parts list:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz OEM
OCZ Platinum 4 GIGs (2 x 2) DDR2 1066 RAM
ZeroTherm Zen FZ120 120mm CPU Heatsink
BIOSTAR TForce TP45HP P45 Motherboard
Overclocks to come. I am stoked!