I bought myself a Mac Mini on my way home from work at Micro Anvika (as the Apple Store in Regent Street didn’t have any of the new Core 2 Duo ones yet) earlier this week

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.

Last weekend (28th) I went to Richer Sounds and bought myself a few bits to upgrad my 2.0 Hi-Fi system to a 5.1 Surround Sound System! I kept the same floor-standing Eltax Symphony 6.3 front speakers, and added a Mordaunt-Short 905i centre speaker, a pair of Mordaunt-Short 903i’s as rear surrounds, and a Mordaunt-Short 308 Avant subwoofer. I swapped my Cambridge Audio A5 amplifier for a Cambridge Audio Azur 540R AV receiver, which is connected to my PC’s S/PDIF output using a very thick Cambridge Audio digital coaxial cable.

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.

Every now and then, when Windows crashes, and I have to reset my PC, the motherboard only detects 1 or 2 of my 4 SATA2 hard disks. It’s always the ones connected to the 3rd and 4th sockets (so it says on the board), but these are actually the 1st and 2nd devices as seen by both Windows and Linux.

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 bought myself one terrabyte of new storage last week from eBuyer, as well as an extra fan to cool the disks

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.