If you read this, I'm sorry.

Hello to everyone who happens to see this. If you've been here before, you might have noticed that it's been a long time since I posted anything here. That's probably because I've been really busy since my last post, and I haven't had much to write about recently. So I'll try to write some stuff here more often, and we'll see how that works out.

Windows 7 Release Candidate

I've spent a couple of weeks messing around with the Windows 7 RC, and so far, I think that Microsoft might finally have made something that works the first time. In 3 weeks of running it, I haven't had a single problem with anything. My hardware was detected right away, I haven't had any driver problems, and everything seems to work. It's certainly a big upgrade from Ubuntu, because I can actually game now! I haven't had a problem yet with a program not working on it, so that's also good. Also, Windows 7 has some cool features that make life a little bit easier. One of these is the new taskbar. Instead of having a little bar on the taskbar for each program, like in XP, it shows the icon of the program that's running, and when you have multiple windows running, you can see a preview of each window by hovering over it.

Here's a picture of that:

Another cool thing is that if you hover over the preview, it temporarily shows the window that is being previewed, and reduces the other windows to outlines.

Here's a picture of that:

Something that I especially liked is the taskbar icons also being progress bars for some programs. What this means, is that if you're transferring files from a flash drive to your computer, for example, instead of having to open up the file transfer dialogue, you just have to glance down at the Windows Explorer icon on the task bar.

Here's what it looks like:

So far, I'm really liking Windows 7, and I think I might buy it when it's officially released. We'll see... This is just a couple of the features that caught my attention. I'll put some more stuff up when I think of it.

PS: If you want my background, just ask me for it. I made it in Blender!

Computer is finished!

I just got my 4GB of Kingston HyperX RAM delivered today, and that meant I had to put my Q9550 in the computer finally! I now have a very awesome computer. It seems like it renders more than twice as fast as the Pentium D did, and I can do lots of other stuff while rendering, too! This looks to be a very awesome CPU.

Motherboard and CPU

Yesterday, I got the best parts of my computer upgrades so far. I was looking on Craigslist two days ago, and something caught my eye. It was a Core 2 Quad Q9550, which is normally $219 on Newegg, but for $150! Some further searching revealed a MSI P43 Neo-F motherboard, about the same motherboard as I was planning on getting, for $65. Both the processor and the motherboard were brand new, and now the only part that I'm missing for my upgrade is the RAM. I'm planning on getting 4GB of Kingston HyperX RAM, maybe I'll upgrade to 8 later. So here's a couple of pictures of the motherboard and the CPU.

Here's a picture of the motherboard, the MSI P43 Neo-F.

This motherboard comes with 4 RAM slots, one PCI-e x16 slot, 2 PCI-e x1 slots, 3 PCI slots, 1 IDE port, 6 SATA ports, onboard surround sound, 4 USB ports, onboard gigabit ethernet, and other goodies.

Here's a picture of all the stuff that came with the motherboard.

And here's a picture of the Q9550, still in the box.

The Q9550 is a quad-core, 2.83 GHz CPU, with a 12mb L2 cache, and a 1333MHz Front Side Bus. This should be a huge upgrade over my Pentium D 930, a 3.00GHz dual core CPU with a 2mb cache.

Finally, here's a picture of the CPU itself sitting next to the stock cooler, which I'm going to use until I get the Xigmatek Dark Knight.

That's it for now!

Computer Upgrade Summary

So I've already posted some stuff about my upcoming computer upgrades, but I figured that I should post my complete plan for my upgrades this summer. This is what I'm planning on doing.
From:

• Intel Pentium D 930 3.00GHz w/ stock cooler
• Intel D102GGC2 Micro ATX Motherboard w/ ATi Xpress 200 Chipset
• ATi Radeon X300 128Mb Onboard Graphics
• 1.5GB Kingston DDR RAM
• Western Digital 80GB IDE Hard Drive
• Ubuntu 9.04
• Cooler Master 380 Watt PSU
• No-name mini tower case

To:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz w/ Xigmatek Dark Knight cooler
• MSI P43 Neo3-F ATX Motherboard
• nVidia Quadro FX 1700 512Mb (upgrading to a GTX 250 later)
• 4GB Kingston HyperX DDR2 RAM
• Western Digital 250GB SATA Hard Drive
• Ubuntu 9.04 & Windows Vista Business 64 SP1
• PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Watt PSU
• Cooler Master CM 690 Mid Tower case

That's my planned computer upgrade for the summer, I'll keep on posting periodic updates as I get new stuff, and change other things.