Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

I put the new Win­dows 7 Pro on my work lap­top today (Dell Lat­i­tude E 5500), and was very impressed in how well it works. The lap­top seems more respon­sive than it did with Win­dows XP.

I have been using Win­dows 7 RC1 on my home com­puter for about 3 months now, and it has been pretty solid. I will con­tinue to use it until the RC runs out June 2010.

My favorite fea­ture is the Win­dows XP mode, where I can install older pro­grams that won’t work with Win­dows 7. Cool thing is that after you install a pro­gram to the vir­tual pc, it shows up on the Win­dows 7 side as well.

Posted in Computing

I have been res­ur­rect­ing an old lap­top of mine this past week.  It is my longest liv­ing lap­top, since 2001.  It is a Toshiba Satel­lite 1755, with a 700MHz Intel Celeron and 192MB of RAM.  I am still debat­ing on what to do with it.  I might make a wall com­puter out of it, or mount it in my kitchen somewhere.

The lap­top had broke screen brack­ets, which my dad had welded back together in 2004.  I gave the lap­top to my mom after I got my Dell Insp­iron 5100.  About a year ago the back light went out in the LCD, so I had to rob a light out of a parts lap­top I had lay­ing around.  The lap­top still gets about an hour and a half of bat­tery time.

Posted in Computing

Just got back from the Google data cen­ter grand open­ing in Lenoir, NC.  We didn’t get to tour any of the build­ings, but we did get to be on site where we could at least see the top of the data cen­ter.  We were not allowed to bring any cam­eras or cam­era phones. 

Google’s Lenoir data cen­ter site

Posted in Computing

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Posted in Computing

I got me a new TV a few months ago. It’s a Hitachi 51″ CRT Pro­jec­tion HD Mon­i­tor (51F59). I decided to run the satel­lite tv through a com­puter PVR so I can record and pause live tv. The soft­ware on the com­puter is GB-PVR.

Posted in Computing

I con­verted an unused room in my house into a com­puter work­room. I built a nice work bench, put in speak­ers, and a tv. Com­pletely net­worked, and it has a 4 port KVM. Oh, and yes, those are Futu­rama comics on the wall.

Posted in Computing

I’m start­ing on a wire­less project, I am going to link 3 houses together with 2.4GHz. I am going to build the anten­nas from scratch except my main link, I will prob­a­bly by a sec­tor. I should have pic­tures and the details up when I’m done with the project.
Shawn

Posted in Computing

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Phil for finally get­ting a Web­site. He runs a lit­tle com­pany called PMC Enter­prises. He does any thing from web design to net­work instal­la­tion. He also teaches an entry level web design class at our local com­mu­nity col­lege. Check out his site for all the details.
Shawn

Posted in Computing

I’m typ­ing this post on my brand new Dell Insp­iron 5100. First Dell I have owned and I like it very much (lots of power). Pic­ture
I also built me a new desk­top. Its got a Soyo Dragon Plat­inum Ultra with an AMD Athlon 2600, a giga­byte of PC3200 DDR RAM, 100 GB Spe­cial Edi­tion West­ern Dig­i­tal hard drive, a GeForce 4 FX 5700 Ultra, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2, all rapped up in a Ther­mal­take Xaser III V1000d Blue Series (the one with the win­dow) case, pow­ered by a 550 Watt power sup­ply. Nice lit­tle com­puter.
Shawn

Posted in Computing