Year: 2006

new computer – working

I’ve got my computer assembled and mostly working. I spent a few hours last night getting the hardware together, and most of the day today installing software, moving stuff from the old drives to the new drive, and stuff like that. I thought I might have a problem with one of the DIMMs, but it got through memtest OK, and I haven’t had any problems with it as I’ve gone through all the software installs and so forth.
The box is definitely quieter than my previous setup, which is nice. It’s a bit faster, too, of course, but not astonishingly so.
I still need to set up most of my external devices — printer, scanner, external drive, Palm, and Pocket PC. And I still have a bit more software to install. Hopefully, I can get most of that done tomorrow.

New Computer

Things to remember when putting together a new computer:

  • If the thing doesn’t POST, check and see if you’re supposed to have *two* cords from the power supply connected to the motherboard instead of just one.
  • You may have to jump through hoops to access the stuff on your old hard drive:
    How to disable simplified sharing and set permissions on a shared folder in Windows XP
    How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP

    • Nano battery life

    Well, I found out today that the Nano’s battery life is definitely more than 10 hours. I started listening to it on my way into work at 7:30am. When I got into my car at 5:30pm to go home, I discovered that I’d forgotten to pause it when I got to work, and it had been playing all day. It still had enough battery life in it to work on my trip home. Cool.

    computer stuff

    In case anyone’s interested, here are all the parts I ordered from Newegg:

  • ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard
  • AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Processor
  • CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit
  • ASUS EAX550GE/TD/256M Radeon X550 256MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card
  • ASUS Atlas A-55GA ATX12V 2.0 550W Power Supply
  • Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JD 250GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive
  • PLEXTOR Beige IDE DVD Burner Model PX-716A/SW

    According to their order status page, everything shipped today, so I should see it all at some point next week. After I get the thing put together, maybe I’ll post some notes on how everything worked out.

    • Code Complete

    I bought Steve McConnell’s Code Complete about 10 years ago. I never quite finished reading it, but I dusted it off at some point last year, and I’ve been reading a chapter every once in a while, when I get the chance. I just finished chapter 18, on code layout. Most of the stuff he’s writing about is stuff I know from experience at this stage in my career, but it’s still worthwhile to reinforce good habits occasionally. And, sometimes, he points out something that hadn’t occured to me, or brings up something I’m not familiar with. There’s a second edition out now that’s probably worth getting, but I think I’ll just try and finish the first edition before I worry about that.

    New computer guts

    I went ahead and ordered a bunch of new parts for my computer from Newegg today. I’m getting a new motherboard, processor, video card, DVD burner, power supply, memory, and hard drive. Hopefully, good enough to hold me for the next three years. (The last time I did this was in late 2002.) I should be OK for Vista, too, whenever that comes out. (I checked the compatibility list for video cards, and I’ve got one that should work with all the new fancy Vista graphics stuff.) Let’s hope all the parts play well with each other, and I don’t break anything trying to put it all together.

    ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer’s Notebook

    I made my way through chapter 2 of ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer’s Notebook today. I’ve really been putting off learning .NET 2.0 and VS.NET 2005, but I’m starting to get motivated now. Partially, I guess it’s the whole “New Year’s resolution” thing. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Dot Net Rocks lately, so that’s helping out on the motivation front. After I get through this book, I’ve got another ASP.NET 2.0 book, a SQL Server 2005 book, Expert C# Business Objects, and a couple of other random programming books to read.