TimNC.com
Life – Computers – Games – Cars

To me HP is like that bad relationship that you’ve cut ties with several times but somehow it keeps creeping back into your life. Years ago I swore off HP vowing to never spend money on their awful products again. Not only had I been burned but my grandfather also had been burned.

My grandfather bought an HP color printer, and figured he might as well buy some extra ink so he wouldn’t have to run to the store in a time of printing need. But when that time came, we discovered that the ink had already expired.

You may ask “Expired, what do you mean expired?” No the ink didn’t dry up, and we didn’t ever take it out of its nice vacuum sealed containers. No the ink simply has a chip in the cartridge itself that says “if you’re past this date, I can’t be used.” Now obviously they did this so you can’t refill the cartridges, and in doing so they’ve ruined legitimate use of official HP products (this amazingly sounds like DRM doesn’t it?).

At any rate, that’s the final straw that broke the HP camel for me, but in a moment of weakness I bought an HP Photosmart C5180 All-in-One printer. I thought at the time it was a wise decision, I mean after all it came with six different color ink wells and it had ethernet, how easy would it be to put on the network and maintain. Logically when I need cyan, I can go get cyan and not have to worry about the other colors. Made perfect sense right?

Well HP got me again, because after only a few months of printing a few pages a month, my ink expired. All of them. All six wells. There’s still ink in them, I can shake them and hear it, but no HP has decided this ink is no longer worthy to touch paper and in my moment of need to be able to print something very important, my printer is demanding that I go spend $20 for a black cartridge and $12 x 5 for color cartridges. And no, just buying the black one and leaving the color ones in there didn’t work, the printer won’t do anything unless all of them are replaced.

So, what shall I replace my HP printer with?

Okay I admit it.  Every time I see this Mac commercial I want to switch from Vista to XP.

I love Vista. People are shocked when I say this, but I really REALLY love Vista. I love the way it looks at it works, and for some reason the “confirm/deny” thing doesn’t bother me. But for things like World of Warcraft or Second Life or other games I have, it locks up. I’ve tried various nVidia drivers and nothing seems to stop it. Vista is very nice about catching the driver crash and restoring itself so I don’t have to reboot… but still the crashing sucks.

So today I sucked it up and backed up everything that was important, formated and reinstalled XP Pro. After 12 reboots after all the patches and updates, I’m SCREAMING FAST on this new machine. I installed WoW and with full screen graphics, everything turned up to max I am at 20% CPU usage and 723 megs of memory usage. I was over that much memory just running Vista!

So maybe I won’t miss Vista at all….

So I’m working on a project that requires the Java SDK.  It requires a specific version, which I cannot find on the SUN Java website.  So I try the latest version anyway, and the application doesn’t work.  I finally find an old archive of the older version, and it still doesn’t work.  But I was shocked at the many many versions of Java available from SUN.  I like to think I’m pretty bright when it comes to computers, but what about an average computer user that finds out they need Java to run something… and they go to this site?

Well around a month ago I did the dumbest computer move ever.  A fan went out in my PC and I dove into it with the power running.  That by itself isn’t that dumb, but unplugging the power from the graphics card while I was doing it (it was in the way) was.  Even dumber was plugging it back in with the power on… and having the plug up side down.  I learned that even though it won’t fit upside down, the contacts can still touch.  POOF went my graphics card, and the machine shut itself off.

 So every Labor Day weekend Shelby has the largest Hamfest in the U.S.  Even though it’s mostly amature radio, there’s always a big showing of computer hardware vendors there.  I decided to wait till then to buy some new hardware.  I can’t buy a new AGP video card, cuz that’s old technology.  Time to dump the whole thing and get new stuff.  So I went to the Hamfest with this list:

1 Intel Dual Core 2.33 GHz minimum
1 Nvidia 680i for Intel motherboard
1 Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS
1 10,000 RPM Hard Drive
1 Power Supply
4 GIGs DDR2

So at the Hamfest things weren’t as I had hoped.  Prices were higher than on New Egg and only one vendor had my 8800 GTS and they wanted wayyyyy to much money for it.  I ran into my buddy Greg and he told me there was a guy in a tent selling good stuff at the other end of the Hamfest, so off I went.  While the guy didn’t have what I wanted in video, he made up for it in processor and ram pricing.  I comprimised on what I got, but I’m still thrilled with the result.

Core 2 Duo Processor E6750  2.66 GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 1333 MHz FSB
MSI P35 Platinum Motherboard
EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS Overclock edition with 512MB DDR3
Seasonic 430W power supply
4 GIGs RAM

He also had a nifty fan that displays case temp in lights, so I got one of those also.

No one at the Hamfest had a 10K RPM drive.  So for now I’m sticking with the old one.

After I got everything home and I ripped the AMD 3000+ out of my acrylic case, the nightmare began.
I carefully put everthing together, turned the machine on and got a blank screen.  I unplugged everything but the minimal items needed to boot, and still got a blank screen.  Then I plugged the floppy drive in and discovered that when I boot, the floppy drive keeps seeking for something.  I did some research and saw that the motherboard was prone to having BIOS issues and that they had to be recovered using a floppy disk.  This typically happens after the BIOS has been updated to a newer version.  Odd that my brand new board would have this issue right out of the box.  But anyway, I put a BIOS image on a floppy disk, put it in the drive and the BIOS restored!  My machine lives!  I tried upgrading the BIOS to a newever version, and the whole thing did the same no-video dance again.  So I’m runing the original BIOS version and none of the newer ones for this board.

The machine is AWESOME.  I was against putting Vista on it but it was so speedy I couldn’t help but try it.  I’ve used Vista on other machines and Vista was a complete dog, but on this hardware it screams like a bullet train.  Everything starts up fast, games load quickly and so far no crashes.  Ok there was this one time when the guys game over that WoW froze….. (sigh, so embarassed) but it hasn’t done it since then so I don’t know what happened there. 

Here’s some pictures.

  
  

Next step is to put Fedora and Beryl on a second hard drive and see how it does.