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My New PSU
After the hassle with the Corsair PSU I had bought, and returned for a refund, I decided to go back to the reviews and pick up something a bit better.
I decided on the Enermax Infiniti 720W. Another modular power supply, a bit more expensive than the Corsair, but more powerful by an extra 100 Watts. It arrived this morning via courier, yay!
Looks like I'm going to be busy this weekend! I will have to remove the frankly pathetic 350W PSU my PC currently has in it, install the 720W Enermax beast, and tidy all the wires away. Now I'll be able to fit the blue cold cathodes I bought a couple weeks ago, to give it a bit of character. Hopefully the Enermax is as silent as the box says it should be, because at the moment the power supply I'm currently using is pretty quiet and I can hardly tell if my PC is actually on or off!
I should also be able to connect up both of the hard drives I have at the same time so I can dual-boot between XP and Vista. At the moment I'm unable to have both connected as the 350W PSU just doesn't have the capacity, I can't even plug in another fan! It won't power up at all if I do.
Posted in Computers at 15:40 |
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The Orange Box
The Orange Box is a video game compilation made by Valve due for release on 10th October 2007. It contains 5 games, some of which I already own:
- Half-Life 2
- Half-Life 2: Episode One
- Half-Life 2: Episode Two
- Portal
- Team Fortress 2
Luckily for those who are in the same situation, Valve are allowing us to give away the products we already have to other people as gifts.
So if anyone wants a copy of Half Life 2 or Half Life 2: Episode One please let me know!
UPDATE: They've gone!
Posted in Games at 14:54 |
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Gossip
It was the final night of the Gossip's UK tour on Saturday 15th, at the Brighton Dome; they're one of my favourite bands and it was my first time seeing Beth, Brace and Hannah live!
I arrived at the Dome just before 6pm, half expecting there to be a bit of a queue, in fact there were only 5 other people waiting there at the time. Doors opened at 7, and I went straight to the front row before it could start filling up... I wanted to be as close to Beth as possible. I know she's gay but that doesn't stop me thinking she's hot.
While I was standing at the front waiting for the Gossip to come on stage, I got talking to the 2 girls standing next to me, Jayne and Helen - a very nice lesbian couple from Essex. I was telling Jayne that I was excited about seeing Gossip for the first time, and disappointed that my girlfriend couldn't be there with me, since she's a big fan too.
The gig itself was fantastic! They started off playing Fleetwood Mac's The Chain, and the band came out on stage during the famous bass-line. They kicked off with a new song, and soon after played my favourite song from the album (after Standing In The Way Of Control of course) Yr Mangled Heart, which got the audience jumping around more than they had been already! They played most of the album from what I can remember, plus a cover or two thrown in for good measure. I'd need to see the set list to be sure. Beth kept apologising for the state of her voice, it was the last date of the tour, and she was finding it hard in places to hit all of the high notes like she usually does. Beth thoroughly deserves a rest! If you've ever seen the Gossip live, or a video of them, you'd know just how much she puts into every performance.
Unfortunately the stage was quite high off the ground, and there was nothing to climb up on, so Beth didn't get down and walk along the front of the crowd like she's well known to do, although she did manage to get down from the stage and headed into the audience during Standing In The Way Of Control, but it was right over the other side of the crowd from me... which was quite disappointing. Maybe next time, eh?
I recorded quite a bit of the gig on my mobile phone (including a bit of one of the support acts - nobra), a little too much to stick it on YouTube without cutting huge chunks out of it or splitting it in two. I had to upload it to Soapbox instead, since they don't limit you on time, just file-size.
You can see the video below, and I have to apologise now for the idiot singing along with Beth, that was me. I didn't realise quite how loud my voice would come out on the recording, and I'm sure I got quite a few of the words wrong... oh well!
After the gig, the set lists were being handed out to members of the audience and I managed to grab one of them, and feeling generous I decided to give it to Jayne, one of the girls I'd been talking to.
She was delighted as I could see that her hand was also outstretched trying to grab one of them, but I got it first. She handed it back to me briefly and said "let's take a picture of you holding it so you can show your girlfriend" which I thought was very thoughtful of her. I didn't actually get to see the front of the set list, I had handed it to Jayne without looking at it at all, and when I held it up I had it facing away the whole time. I find that mildly amusing, since I was the one who managed to snag it first and I never got to see it! I got a few hugs out of it though!
It was an amazing night. I really cannot wait for Beth and the others to come back to the UK so I can go see them again!!
Posted in Music at 23:26 |
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Thieving Bastards
A few days ago someone went into our garage and stole 2 sets of golf clubs, belonging to my dad and my brother. The contents of my dad's golf bag add up to over £3000, so someone's managed to get themselves a fantastic five fingered discount. Bastard.
Posted in Rant at 22:25 |
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Upcoming TV Shows
I have updated the list to include episode lists of each show that has them, so it's easier to find out if the show is actually airing that week or not - thanks to the ongoing Writers' Strike.
| Still To Air | |
| 24 | Returns: Unknown |
| Monk | Returns: 2008-01-18 |
| Lost | Returns: 2008-02-06 |
| Ended |
| Dexter |
| Dragons' Den |
| Have I Got News For You |
| Heroes |
| QI |
| Secret Diary Of A Call Girl |
| Spooks |
Posted in Movies/TV at 20:53 |
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Anti-Piracy Ad From The IT Crowd
HOME SEWING IS KILLING FASHION
Posted in Humour at 15:24 |
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PSIService
If you use a recent Corel product, such as Paint Shop Pro Photo XI you may have noticed that a new service was added to your PC called ProtexisLicensing. This is a process that is set to run automatically and is somehow supposed to reduce piracy. In other words it's a waste of your resources, and it does not actually need to be running for PSP to work. You can't, however, simply disable the service since this will stop Paint Shop Pro from running.
Here are instructions on how to remove the service safely, and have PSP continue to work:
First, open up services.msc and find the ProtexisLicensing sevice. Stop it and set it to Disabled.
Now browse to C:\Windows\System32.
Rename PSIService.exe to PSIService.bak
Copy PSIKey.dll to the program folder, e.g. C:\Program Files\Corel\Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI
Rename PsiClient.dll to PsiClient.bak
Rename PSIKey.dll to PsiClient.dll
And you're done! You should now be able to run Paint Shop Pro without PSIService.exe running in the background. If you have problems, just restore the backed up files.
I have tested this on both Paint Shop Pro Photo XI (11.20) and Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 (12.01) and it works for me.
Posted in Computers at 12:27 |
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New Monitor
My new 22" widescreen LCD screen arrived today from ebuyer.com. I paid only £149.99 for it as there was a special deal on, and I went for the free delivery option as well.
I can't wait to get it home and try it out, and put my old one on eBay!
Update: I have now replaced my old CRT with the snazzy new LCD, doesn't it look great!
Unfortunately it's too low down, so I will have to buy a mounting arm to fit to my desk. At first I wasn't sure that the screen had the required VESA mounting holes for the arm, but I discovered they were hidden by stickers so I will be able to mount the LCD and set it to the required height, before my neck begins to ache too much!
Update 2: I've just purchased a desk mount for the screen. It's the same as the one I have at work, but should be black so it will match everything else. At least I hope it'll be black!
Update 3: OK, so the arm has arrived, but it's not the same as I have at work. The one at work is gas assisted (and beige) and the new one is not gas assisted (and black). On the new one, there's a knob you have to pull out before adjusting the height. I doubt I'll be moving the screen around very often so it's not too much of a bother. It seems quite hard to find a gas assisted mounting arm (and in black) for the same price as I paid for the one at work!
Update 4: I set the arm up on my desk yesterday but I wasn't happy with it at all. Since my desk is quite deep, the screen ended up being about 3 or 4 inches further back than I wanted it to be. I had to drop the resolution down a bit just to be able to read what was on the screen, although it did end up a bit blurry since I was no longer using the screen's native resolution. I decided that particular mounting arm was not for me, and I'm sending it back for a refund. My screen is now propped up on top of a hardback book until I find another solution.
Posted in Computers at 10:46 |
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My New Computer Part 4
I spent most of the weekend migrating the contents of my old PC's hard drive to a brand new one I bought last week. Another Western Digital 320GB, same model as the one I have in the new PC with Vista on.
As I've mentioned in a previous entry, I once again used the fantastic Acronis MigrateEasy to transfer everything over - that part was painless. The next bit wasn't so much painless as a pain in the backside!
Moving Windows from one set of hardware to a completely different set is not a simple task. Once I'd completed the migration, I moved the new drive into the new PC and turned it on. I booted off the XP CD and ran a repair installation. It came up with a few errors saying it couldn't find files on the disc - only way I could get past them was to ignore them. I was hoping it wouldn't completely break everything if it couldn't find them. Luckily it didn't seem to screw things up too much, I'm guessing it was trying to find the latest versions of the files which were newer than on the disc - such as iexplore.exe - when Setup had completed, XP had been reverted back to using IE6 instead of IE7.
I had to reinstall all the updates since SP2 was released, which is about 85, and for some reason msconfig.exe had disappeared entirely, copied that over from another system. I haven't come across any other system files which are missing yet. I've had to reinstall a few programs such as Nero Burning ROM and Adobe Acrobat, either due to their activation systems or because the installation has been corrupted by the repair/migration... but all in all it went well.
One of the first things I did after getting back into Windows was try to uninstall the old motherboard drivers, this caused a blue-screen immediately so I didn't do that again! I rebooted and straight away installed my new motherboard drivers off the CD it came with and left the old ones alone. Updated the graphics card drivers to the latest NVIDIA release too.
I did have a problem with my Logitech mouse drivers, but I managed to fix that by renaming a driver file before reinstalling them, something to do with WDF? Not entirely sure why there was a problem but thankfully SetPoint is now working 100%.
I'm quite amazed that XP is actually working well on new hardware, and definitely running faster than it was - which should be expected considering how much better the new hardware is compared to what it was.
I guess my next step should be to backup the C: drive, just in case something goes seriously wrong. I installed that copy of Windows all the way back in October 2004. It has since been moved from the original 120GB (PATA) to a 320GB drive (PATA) in the same PC, then been moved from that drive to another 320GB drive (SATA) and moved to completely new hardware. So there is every chance that it will end up corrupt somehow, and it would be absolutely terrible if I lost data. I have still got the 320GB PATA drive from the old PC with everything intact so I will have a complete copy of everything before I migrated, but I would like a backup of how it is NOW.
I was really surprised just how noisy the old PC was compared to my new one when I hooked it back up and started the migration. I was also surprised to find that both of the fans fitted to the front of the case seem to have died, they weren't even that old! So most of the noise was being generated by the remaining 3 fans. I was so glad when the migration task was done and I could change back to the new PC... and have some peace and quiet! I can't believe I put up with it for so long!!
Posted in Computers at 16:11 |
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