The server now has 6GB of RAM; two 1GB and two 2GB sticks of reliable Corsair XMS2 DDR2

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!

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.

The extra 5 inches make a pretty big difference in pretty much everything – working, chatting or browsing web pages

Gaming at 1920×1200 is also a big change, once I had configured the games to run at that resolution – newer games, such as Command and Conquer 3 and Counter-Strike: Source were easy, you just select the resolution in a dropdown list. In others, such as Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam, it takes a bit of config file editing – but once that’s done, it works really well. Being able to see further to the left and the right helps a bit too

If I had the money, I’d definitely buy another one, but I’m saving for my new PC and about to buy an iPod Touch, so I won’t be getting another one for quite a while.

If you’re looking for a new monitor, and can stretch to the price for this one, I highly recommend it!

So far the keyboard has been great – as with all other Apple products, it “just worked”, even in Windows! It’s much lower on the desk than any other keyboard I’ve used, and seems to be smaller without actually looking smaller, which will let me push it further out of the way when I need to use my laptop on my desk.

I haven’t yet tried it in any games or doing any serious coding, but from my experience chatting with it, writing comments on blogs, and just “using” it, I would say it’s probably the best keyboard I’ve used to date – I highly recommend buying one if you need a new keyboard

So far it has just amazed me – considering it only has an Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics processing unit, you wouldn’t know that that was all that powered it from the way it does the animations. Exposé, Dashboard, the “genie” effect when minimizing and maximizing things to/from the dock, the “Flurry” screensaver, and various other subtle effects really show off the power of OS X

As Apple (and fans of Apple) often say, “it just works” – and I’d say they’re right Everything is so easy to install – most of the time it’s a simple drag and drop of one icon to a folder, and it does the rest for you. Even complicated applications, such as the Adobe CS3 are very easy and quick to install.

It took me quite a while (several hours) to get everything installed, and then another couple of hours to get the S/PDIF output on my motherboard to send the correct signal – AC3Filter helped a lot here, once I got it working.

Music still sounds great, although the extra bass is very welcome I also tried some DTS-encoded music, which sounds amazing, compared to normal stereo music. And of course movies sound awesome too. It makes a pretty big difference playing games too, once you get them working in surround-sound mode

For more photos of my desk, the speakers and the receiver, take a look on my Flickr.

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.

So today, after removing 2 currently un-used and un-powered drives from the case, I swapped the cables around (and tidied them using some spare spiral wrap), so that it would stop moving the main boot drive to be third in the boot order preference list.

But of course, Windows didn’t like this, and I got an ever-so-helpful message on boot:

NTLDR is missing.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

The fix was easy, I just swapped the cables back.

while ($system->has_changed()) { show_unhelpful_error_message(); }

Grub (The standard Linux boot loader) can handle you moving drives around… It barely blinked on mine; it just said “invalid path” (or something along those lines), and was very easy to correct.

But Windows? Oh no! That’s far to difficult… *sigh*.

I ran into a couple of problems, the primary one being that I can’t use the built-in RAID controller on my motherboard, as it’s only SATA1, not SATA2, which is twice the speed. The drives do work on SATA1, but that defeats the purpose of buying fast drives! So I’m left with some left-over drives, as I can only plug in 4 at a time.

As it happens one of the four new drives has a big problem. Windows installed onto it very slowly, and it had issues… The PC would just freeze doing pretty much anything. So I’ve arranged to RMA it for a refund from eBuyer

But everything is fine now – I have a 200GB partition for Windows, my profile folder and programs, and a 30GB partition for Linux (and a 2GB swap partition for Linux too). Another 250GB drive for downloads, and the last one for Games. My other 250GB drive has my music and some old backups on it.

The next motherboard I buy will have at least 8 SATA2 (or better, if SATA3/4/5… is out by then!) ports, as well as at least 4 SATA2+ ports on a RAID controller to allow for future expansion

So the grand total of storage capacity I have here, and in my colocated server, comes to about 2.5TB*

* It would be more, but my 300GB Maxtor Onetouch died recently.