It makes such a big difference, especially on my Mac, when comparing to what I had before (a nasty LG 17″)… Colours actually look right, and I don’t have to position my head dead-centre in order for it not to look inverted!

There have been several rumours flying round, saying that the 2408WFP’s have input lag problems. However, I don’t play games that much, and the few times I have (Half-Life 2: Death Match), I’ve noticed nothing. I do, however, watch a lot of (HD) movies on my PC: I’ve noticed no lag in these either. To be honest, a few milliseconds here or there really isn’t worth complaining about

All I need now is a new GPU so I can actually play modern games at 1920×1200!

I jumped on the downloads (Installer DVDs of 32bit and 64bit) as soon as I could, burnt the 64bit DVD, and rebooted, hoping to have it installed within half an hour.

I already had 10GB of empty space at the start of one of my 750GB drives in preparation – all I had to do was tell the BIOS to boot the DVD and install it!

Well, that was the idea… If only it was that easy… Linux is never (at least in my experience) that obedient

I got into the second step of the installer (the first is chosing the language), where it asks you to chose your keyboard layout/language. I picked “United Kingdom”, and clicked “Next”… and the whole installer (minus the mouse cursor) froze. I assumed it was processing something, and waited a couple minutes… no change. CTRL+ALT+F1-8 did nothing (normally they’d switch to other terminals/logs). CTRL+ALT+Backspace did nothing. CTRL+ALT+Del did nothing! I lost my patience at that point and pressed the reset button…

I rebooted and tried again: same error. I rebooted and tried the default “US – English” layout: again, same error. I rebooted yet again, and tried the text-only installer… I’m sure you can guess what happened when it asked me my keyboard layout… Yup, it did it again.

I have now given up with trying to install it, at least for – I might try it again in VMware, or burn the 32bit DVD (or perhaps a 64bit LiveDVD, if there is one) and try that instead, once I can find a bit of spare time.

Some of the basic specs:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
• OCZ 2×2GB 1066MHz DDR2
• Gigabyte X48-DQ6 Motherboard
• 4×750GB, 3×500GB, 1×250GB Samsung Spinpoint F1
• Antec Quattro 850W PSU
• Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit SP1

For the complete specs list, see the systems page. Thanks to Scan, eBuyer and CCL for selling all the components I wanted

I will be putting Fedora 9 on it (in 64bit of course) once it’s released.

I’ve played it for a few hours, and so far it’s been amazing – great story, graphics and gameplay. I look forward to playing bits of it again once I’ve upgraded my ageing computer – when I tried it at 1920×1080 and “High” settings I got between 1 and 2 FPS! Playing at 1280×800 wasn’t much better, but was (mostly) playable

It’s no Half-Life (2) beater, but it comes pretty close. Of course, I might change my opinion once I play it through again on a better PC, but that’s unlikely, especially after how good HL2:Episode 2 was. However, it’s still one of the best games I’ve played in a long time, and I highly recommend it

I have now finally got one after the Apple Store got them back in stock! And, so far, it’s been amazing. My InvisibleShield hasn’t quite arrived yet, so I’m going to keep the temporary plastic cover on it until it does.

The interface is amazing… Coverflow has absolutely no lag or delay, unlike in iTunes on my PC – it’s not everyday you can say your mp3 player performs better than your computer!

Hopefully I’ll be able to hack it soon to get some of the iPhone applications on it, such as Mail, Weather and Google Maps.

Two weeks ago, my power supply packed up – it was working fine, I left the room for an hour, and the PC was off and refused to turn back on

Luckily the PSU was still under warranty, so hopefully I should receive a repaired/replaced PSU some time soon after RMAing it last week.

On Friday of last week though, my Graphics Card died! This was also still under warranty, so I RMA’d it today to Scan, who will hopefully send me a replacement by the end of the week.

They say bad things come in threes, so I’m waiting for something else to stop working now – unless the third thing was Royal Mail’s overly-excessive (and seemingly random) pricing. £14 to send a PSU with very little insurance, but only £6 to send a graphics card with up to £500 insurance! WTF!

I’ve been using my Laptop with a full-size keyboard, my normal and my monitor mouse plugged in, so I can at least keep more-or-less up-to-date with things (email, RSS feeds etc), but all of the stuff I was working on is on my PC – so all my VB, PHP and C# development has come to a complete stop until the PC is revived.

I’m mirroring (locally only though, not publicly) the “Core” and “Updates” repo’s – I looked into doing the “Extras” repo too, but that’s nearly 10GB of files! That will have to wait for bigger hard disks… :P

So far I’ve got my laptop and my local Linux server using my local repo, and I’ll set my main pc to use it once I’ve installed Linux on it.

I also installed lighttpd on my local server, running on an alternate port, which should make installing large software packages over the LAN that little bit faster than if I used Apache 2, which runs on the default port. I’d switch to lighttpd as the main web server, but I couldn’t get PHP working well with it the last time I tried.

(Thanks to some random website for the first pic; I still haven’t taken the protective plastic coating off the metal as I will be moving where the PC is in a week or two and I don’t want it scratched :P)

After that I spent another hour checking I had backed everything up, burnt my custom XP Pro install disk (which didn’t actually work, but now’s not the time…), and turned the PC off. After wrestling for about 10 minutes with all the various cables, screws and components I managed to get the old CPU, graphics card and motherboard out. Another 20 minutes later, the new stuff was in and I was nearly ready to boot. However, I did take the time to read the manual before all of this :P
Now, after the install, a little tweaking of windows and updating of motherborad firmware the system is running fine. I got a massive 6520 points in 3DMark05 – This doesn’t sound like much but don’t let it fool you

So I now have a kick-ass gaming PC that can do anything I want (and a lot more), and it actually looks good, plays good, and sounds good (in other words, it doesn’t sound like a hoover anymore! :D)

I’ve skinned Windows this time too, and made a new custom wallpaper:

And for those who are really interested, here are the specifications of what I bought:

• GigaByte Geforce 7800GT
• Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
• AMD Athlon 64 3000+

And what I already had:

• Hiper Type-R 580W
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 80GB SATA
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus10 160GB SATA
• NEC DVD±RW Dual Layer
• GigaByte 3DCooler Ultra

Anyone interested in where I got all this from, or where they can buy PC components from should visit Scan Computers

- Fr3d