https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=3438&p=41970#p41970
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GrouchoCaesar
Saturday, 13 February 2010, 06:35 AM

Re: The Twelve Tasks Of Grouchales
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State of play Update #5

Thought I'd bring y'all up to date on what I've been doing with all my little techno-toys.  Kinda explains why - after spending a butt-load of cash - I still haven't done much. Doesn't help that I had to spend an ungodly amount of money upgrading my Wintel machines to Windows 7…. Grrrrr.

1 LEELA

Upgraded Leela to Snow Leopard, and added another 2Gb of RAM.  I've set up the Wacom tablet on her, because the tablet's dimensions are the same shape as Leela's screen.  (All my other PC's have widescreen monitors, and it can be a little problematic using the tablet with 'em).  I'm using Leela for all my major image editing and storage.  Also set up a firewire external HDD for use with Time Capsule…

2 DAWN

Until recently I've been running a freeware DVD Movie catalog program on Dawn to keep track of my movie library.  Unfortunately, the developer is no longer supporting it, and I needed more features.  So I bought Bento 3 for my new Mac (See AMY below) and set up my own database…  Which leaves Dawn without anything to do.  I'll probably give her away.

5 TABITHA

Gave her away to a friend after I bought AMY (See below).  After using a touchscreen system for quite a while, I can see the advantages, but the technology still isn't quite there yet.  It was a very nice PC, though.

6 ANYA

After my initial gripe with her, Anya performed sterling service as my net machine.  No issues whatsoever.  After my flatmate came back from Oz, I gave him Anya back…  Though he can buy his own monitor!

7 TARA, 8 HARMONY, 10 WILLOW

Untouched… although Tara and Harmony are due to be upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium when I can be bothered getting around to it.

Willow will NOT be upgraded to Windows 7 just yet, because quite frankly she is already working perfectly as it it, and as she is… er, will be...  my primary CGI workstation I'm not about to fix something that ain't broke.

9 FAITH

Upgraded her PSU to 800 watts so I could put my GeForce 9600GT into her.  Faith is now set up as a dedicated simulator PC to run MS Flight Sim X, and a few military sims.  Got a good set of flight controls and everything.

11 CORDELIA

Sold her for $400, which considering how old she was was quite amazing.

12 JESSICA a.k.a. BIG RED

The best laptop I 'd ever owned… and I [i]gave[/i] her to my little sister…

13 KENDRA

…because I upgraded to this little beastie.  Toshiba's new Qosmio X500 laptop.

[url=http://blog.laptopmag.com/hands-on-toshibas-qosmio-x500-gaming-rig-has-quad-core-conservative-design]When You Need Something Heavy Enough To Kill A Whale...

And I'm not entirely happy with it.  Not because of the hardware (runs nice and fast), but because this machine was released with Windows 7 64-bit as the only supported OS (on the same day as Windows 7 was), and until some of the nagging little flaws in Windows 7 are patched, I'm a little ticked with it.  (Anybody had the wonderful "Let's not refresh Explorer when we delete things" bug yet?  When you're trying to prune a ton of old directories?  Hitting F5 constantly gets mighty tiring real quick…)

Plays games fast, though...

Kendra

Toshiba Qosmio X500 Laptop
Intel Mobile Core i7 Q720 1.6Ghz 
4 Gb DDR3 RAM 
1 Gb DDR3 nVidia 250 GTS GPU 
18" 1920 x 1080 LCD Screen
500Gb 7200rpm HDD + 500Gb 5400rpm HDD
Panasonic Blu-Ray Burner 
Windows 7 Home Premium

14 AMY

I really like my iMac, Leela.  A lot.  So when I decided to get rid of… er, I mean give away or sell… Cordelia, Tabitha, Anya and Dawn, I thought I might as well go MacBook Pro.  So I bought a little 13" MBP in December, and have been swearing at it since January.  It's the perfect size, great screen, light and tough, long lasting on the battery side, runs all my bought Mac software… and has to be constantly [EXPLETIVE DELETED] re-installed because the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] file system keeps [EXPLETIVE DELETED]… um, corrupting itself.  Grrrrrrrrrr….

A couple of weeks experimentation has confirmed that the 160Gb HDD inside it is flaky.  I've installed the OS onto an external USB HDD and have been booting from that, and so far I've absolutely no problems with file corruption on that drive.  As soon as I do an erase and install on the internal drive, everything works for about a day or so.  But inevitably it will start taking an age to boot, or not boot at all.  And at least once, it's corrupted itself within a couple of hours of use.  The HDD reports it's okay, and Disk Utility finds no initial problems with it after each install.  I've even done a Secure Erase on the entire partition once to see if that would help.  But no… so I'm gonna have to get it fixed.  Under warranty, but still aggravating considering it's only a couple of months old.

I wouldn't be so ticked, but that I've set the DVD region on Amy to Region 1 so I can watch TV shows I've bought from Amazon in my bedroom at night instead of having to use the home theatre system.  (Halfway through the Phil Silvers show 50th anniversary set…)

Amy

13" MacBook Pro  
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz 
2 Gb RAM
nVidia geForce 9400M 
1280 x 800 LCD Display 
160 Gb SATA HDD (when it works)
OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard


