Long Time Ago

I was looking for something today and found this old hard drive among some spare parts. Its circa 1988-89 from what I found, 40-49 mb of storage, I found an old advertisement listing it for around $399.00. I cant believe the size of it for what it is. kind of funny now we can put 8 GB in something 31.3 MM long. wow we have come a long way in 20 years. I also found my old copy of Liesure Suit Larry, wow that was a long time ago before I had kids and all, I had a comadore 64 and a Tandy 1000 back in those days. Ok I feel old now guess its time to go.

AMD or INTEL?

This is in reply to a comment from yesterday asking who is better AMD or INTEL, its not really a question of who is better since both manufacturers have a good product, but a matter of what works for you better with whatever you use your computer for, I know for instance that some pc based video surveillance (DVR) cards don't play nice with AMD and other things that just don't work with INTEL. But I do have one complaint with INTEL even if it is a minor flaw, their method of securing the CPU heatsink could use a lot of work.
those little plastic things tend to break. this picture is of an aftermarket heatsink but it has the same plastic clips as the OEM fan that had failed on mine.


Here is an AMD AM2 heatsink you can see the mounting hardware they use, the motherboard has a bracket screwed in place and the heatsink has a metal retaining system.


Here is an INTEL setup that has failed you can see the bottoms of the 4 plastic pins they use and note the red circle as this one is broken. this caused the system to overheat and fail over time.I took 4 small screws and nuts and replaced the plastic clips on one intel heatsink and that seemed to work fine. My INTEL system is what I use for games as it seems to out perform the AMD's in some games but INTEL seems to cost more than AMD for comparable CPU's.

XFX 8200

I built a computer for someone back a few months ago with an XFX Geforce 8200 motherboard and a Phenom x4 cpu, at first everything was fine but after a few weeks it began acting up. It even fragged the Linux kernal on one install, it had multiple problems listed in the logs most of which led to the cpu.After giving it some thought I got a new Asus motherboard identicle to mine I use every day and bought an Athlon 64 X2 7550 cpu. I swapped the motherboard out and put the XFX one with the new cpu in my second computer I use for my personal weather station and stuff because I wanted to get to the bottom of the problem, Well its been about 3 weeks and so far I have had no problems at all with it. The CPU I put in it is a screamer it has the KUMA core and 3 MB cache. I even overclocked it some to try and get it do do something but so far its been running fine and I even like the motherboard and its features. I also put 2 GB of the OCZ SLI memory in it and that even works like a charm. After not finding anything wrong with my new setup I decided to just keep it and see how things go. That left me with a pile of spare parts laying about so I built a Frankenputer with all of it and handed it off to my youngest son.

Test Your Speed

We Need a National High Speed Internet Policy

I think this is a good idea.

One Shitty Computer

Now we have all had dust and things in our computers and I have even showed you one here. This one just took #1 for my shit list of 2009 I do have to hand it to DELL because it still runs it might be a little slow but it boots. I have seen computers in Automotive garages that are cleaner than this I even had to network one at a local sewer plant and it didn't have any shit in it (pun intended) I guess its since I like to keep my computers pristine.
I am not real sure what the stuff in the lint is and I really don't want to. I had thoughts of taking the air compressor to this but then I remembered what happened last time I tried that it did a motherboard in.

Back from Camping

Well we have returned from camping we had a great time and took may pictures I will share some in the coming days.We did a lot of hiking now I will have to rest up before I go back to work.

This deer was very interested in us and what we were doing she was in no way bothered by us.

Going Camping

Just so everyone knows we are going camping so I willnot be dropping for a few days but I am going to try and get a post in from my cell.