Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Home Desktop Upgrade 2012

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It was that time again for yet another upgrade to the old home desktop.

There’s been quite a few desktop upgrades in the time I’ve been blogging. The first was back in October of 2007, then again in December 2007 I added some accessories, in January 2008 I had a hard disk die, in December of 2008 I replaced the motherboard and CPU,  in July 2010 I upgraded to Windows 7 64bit leaving Windows Vista behind, and most recently in October 2011 I upgraded my video card and replaced a dying power supply.

While I was potentially looking at building an entirely new desktop (Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz) I decided to hold off for now and instead take the leap into SSDs, replacing my trusty  Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM with a SAMSUNG 830 Series MZ-7PC128D/AM 2.5″ 128GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD.

The choir of migrating the data was pretty painless although it did take quite sometime to run through the backups (you always make backups just in case) and then copy the partitions using Norton Ghost. When all the bits were done moving around I just unplugged the Raptor and plugged in the Samsung. Windows 7 booted right up and announced it had discovered new hardware and asked me to reboot. That was it… my desktop went from taking about 100-120 seconds to boot to taking about 30 seconds to boot.

I’ll give credit to NewEgg once again… they shipped in one day from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.

Here’s what I’m running these days?

  • Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 @2.99Ghz
  • 8GB G.Skill PC2-6400 DDR2 memory (4 sticks)
  • Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard
  • MSI R6950 Twin Frozr II OC Radeon HD 6950 2GB
  • 128GB Samsung 830 SSD
  • 1TB Western Digital SATA II hard disk
  • 2TB Seagate Barracuda Green (5900RPM)
  • Antec P180 case
  • Rosewill RX750 power supply
  • Logitech G15 keyboard
  • Logitech G5 mouse
  • Logitech C910 webcam
  • 2 x ASUS 27″ LCD display

Cheers!

Home Desktop Upgrade 2011

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It was that time again for yet another upgrade to the old home desktop.

I thought I had posted about my last upgrade but I can’t seem to find the post right now. In any case this time it was the impending release of Battlefield 3 that ultimately drove me to replace my aging Nvidia 8800GTS 320MB with a MSI R6950 Twin Frozr II OC Radeon HD 6950 2GB. I’ve been lumbering along with the 8800GTS for the past 4 years so it was time for an upgrade.

While doing my research between the NVIDIA and AMD options I came across a lot of cooling issues between both the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series and the NVIDIA GeForce 560, 570 and 580 series. In the end I decided to give AMD a try since the last few cards I’ve purchased where NVIDIA and I decided to go with the pricier MSI R6590 Twin Frozr II since it had some great reviews and in user feedback it was reported to be one of the cooler running cards on the market.

I also took the opportunity (while the case was open) to replace my dying power supply. I chose a Rosewill Xtreme Series RX750-S-B 750W power supply. I’ve gone through two Antec power supplies in the past three years and last year I used a Rosewill 650W in my wife’s computer and it’s still going strong, despite running almost 24×7.

What am I running these days?

  • Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 @2.83Ghz
  • 8GB G.Skill PC2-6400 DDR2 memory (4 sticks)
  • Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard
  • 150GB Western Digital Raptor SATA II hard disk
  • 1TB Western Digital SATA II hard disk
  • Antec P180 case
  • Rosewill RX750 power supply
  • Logitech G15 keyboard
  • Logitech G5 mouse
  • Logitech C910 webcam
  • ASUS 27″ LCD display

I won’t waste to much ink here but let me just say that the map(s) in Battlefield 3 beta are just spectacular with this card. I definitely need to go back and play a few rounds of Battlefield Bad Company 2 with this video card just to see what the maps really look like now that I have the hardware to play it on high settings. It amazing how much eye candy is lost when you need to dial down the settings so you can play a newer game on older hardware.

While on the topic of gaming let me give a shout out to Tactical Gamer.

If you’re a mature gamer looking for some good times and teamwork orientated tactics give Tactical Gamer a look.

I know your all embarrassed to admit it but you can’t be all work and no play.

Anyone else a gamer? If so what games do you enjoy?

Cheers!

Home Desktop Upgrade 2010

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I shouldn’t really call it an upgrade per se but I managed to find some time yesterday (vacation day) to rebuild my home desktop personal computer with Windows 7 (64bit) replacing my Windows Vista (64bit) installation.

I backed up all my files to an old server I had setup running Openfiler, it’s amazing how much space all those home movies and pictures take up. I reformatted my primary hard drive and ran through the installation. It took longer than I expected but I later found out that I had left the floppy drive enabled in the BIOS (there was no floppy drive in the desktop) and that may have had something to-do with the longer than customary installation time I experienced.

Now I’m left with re-installing all the different applications that I use from time to time. When I was younger I didn’t mind this task so much because it generally translated into a significant increase in speed and performance of the desktop (at least for a while). These days though I find myself not having the same excitement I once had in the past. I guess I’m getting old and grumpy…

While I’m rambling on let me say that Ubuntu (specifically release 10.1) is really becoming a strong alternative desktop operating system. While it still took some messing, the installation of some basic tools such as the Java Runtime Engine, Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash was much improved over previous releases. I was very impressed with the performance as well.

So my question for folks… what if anything are you using at home to store your home movies and pictures? Are you using an old PC running some open source solution? Did you go out and purchase an all-in-one solution?

I  just started using an old IBM xSeries 345 with 1GB of RAM and ~ 300 GB of disk space across 6 drives. I’m concerned that my electric bill is going to go threw the roof next month if I run this thing 24×7 as my media storage server. It might be cheaper for me to just purchase a Drobo or something along those lines from an kWh  perspective not to mention the space. cooling and noise issues created by running and IBM xSeries 345 in your basement. I had accidentally forgotten to connect both power supplies when I first turned it on. The beast sounded like a jet engine running full blast until I connected the second power supply and the fans slowed down to their normal operating speed.

Cheers!

Home Desktop Upgrade 2008

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intelq9550I know your asking “who cares” but it’s a blog and not every post needs to be totally useful. In this case I thought I would just spew about my latest desktop creation, yes I still build my own PCs and overclock them as well.

Over the holidays I upgraded my PC by replacing the motherboard, CPU and memory. I also stepped up from Windows XP to Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit) and I jumped back to an Intel platform from previously using AMD.

I used the following components:

I can honestly say that I’m quite pleased with how everything has turned out. I still play a few games here and there (Left 4 Dead is just awesome and I’m a big fan of Steam) and the DX10 support in Vista is just amazing on the eVGA 8800GTS that I reused from my previous system.  There was only one small issue that I encountered that involves the rear audio jacks from the RealTek HD Audio codec which I believe is a Windows Vista 64-bit driver problem since the audio hardware works with Ubuntu Live.

I also stumbled upon Windows Media Center and I have to honestly say that I’m very impressed. I ripped a few of my favorite DVDs to my hard disk and had my own on-demand library right there on my own PC.

I’m sure there will be a few folks scratching there heads asking why this bloat didn’t just purchase an Intel Core i7 processor inplace of the older Intel Core 2 processor. Honestly, while the price of the each processor was in line with the other the motherboard and memory were much more expensive for the Core i7 platform.

Cheers!

Update: January 22, 2009

I was finally able to resolve the audio issue by installing the latest drivers (v2.14) from the RealTek website for the “High Definition Audio Codec”.

VirtualBox 2.0.0 Released

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While this isn’t generally within the realm of the topics that I discuss here I was impressed enough to give it a blurb. A few months ago I started playing around with a few of the different virtual desktop solutions available. I wasn’t really looking to spend any $$$ so I looked around at all the free and open source solutions. I stumbled across VirtualBox which had recently been acquired by Sun Microsystems and was very impressed. I had VirtualBox installed on a Windows XP desktop within minutes and had an Ubuntu 8.04 installation up and running in a virtual window within an hour.

On September 4, 2008 VirtualBox 2.0.0 was released. There’s suppose to be some significant performance increases in this release including support for SATA NCQ (Native Command Queuing) when using raw disks and Nested Paging on AMD machines. This release also promises support for 64 bit guest hosts. You can find the full change log here.

If you’re looking to toy with Linux, VirtualBox makes it really easy to install Linux on top of your existing Windows XP desktop/laptop without the worry of destroying your personal computer. While I still dual boot a number of my desktops/laptops I’ve been finding VirtualBox almost indispensable in my daily work activities. There are even a number of organizations running VirtualBox as a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution from a number of different thin clients.

You might even be persuaded to load up a virtual machine to check out an upcoming clone of Microsoft Windows called ReactOS. It’s not based on Linux in any fashion but promises to be compatible with all software that can run on Microsoft Windows. While it’s still in it’s infancy (alpha) it will be interesting to see how Microsoft will respond if it ever starts to gather steam.

VirtualBox is definitely worth the time and effort to download and install if your interested in a virtual desktop solution.

Cheers!

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