Guess what? I’ve been getting more technical devices. Technical things make me happy inside. I recently bought two cheap computers to use as my new download PC (With double the power ), and a file server. They don’t have particularly fancy components, but they’re plenty to do what I need them to. The specs for each of them are:

Download PC

• CPU: AMD Athlon 1500+ 1.4GHz
• M/B: GigabyteGA-7N400 Pro2 (Rev 1.x)
• RAM: 1GB DDR 400MHz
• GFX: nVidia 5500FX
• HDD: 40GB + 120GB
• OS: Windows XP SP3

New Download PC

The download PC is much easier to use now, it’s faster, does more without complaining, and… It actually turns off when I tell it to! The old one used an old motherboard, back in the days when the PSU didn’t switch off when you shutdown the OS. Now I can finally shut it down remotely without having to get up and turn it off. The only problem with this new machine is the noise, it has a large heatsink and fan that is so loud when running at full speed. It has a fan controller, so I can at least reduce the speed/noise a little, but it’s nowhere near quiet.

File Server

• CPU: AMD Athlon 3200+ 2.00 GHz
• M/B: Gigabyte GA-K8N-Pro SLI
• RAM: 2.6GB DDR 400MHz
• GFX: nVidia 6600GT
• HDD: 200GB + 200GB + 500GB + 750GB + 1TB = 2.6TB
• OS: Windows Server 2003 SP2

New File Server

My new server looks good too, it’s using a gaming case. Currently has a front 80mm fan with blue LEDs, one rear 120mm fan with green LEDs, and it had two 80mm fans with blue LEDs on the side below the window, but one of them was completely dead, so I took it out. I decided to go with Win Server 2003 for this server instead of WinXP, as this allows me to manage file sharing a little more, like controlling which users can access certain locations. I was thinking of making it run automatic backups on my computers in the network, but I realised that it can’t turn on the other computers remotely, as my router doesn’t support Wake on LAN. Using my server for just file sharing seems a bit of a waste, so I’m thinking I might run VMware Server on it as well.

You may also be wondering, “Where did you get all the extra hard drives for your server?” I have an awesome explanation for that. What happened was, I ordered two Samsung 1TB drives from an online store for $87 each as part of a group order with three other friends from Tafe. We ordered seven 1TB drives in total and to our surprise, something amazing happened. When one of us was setting up the drive in an external enclosure, we saw the size of the disk as being 1800GB and thought, “That isn’t right…” We checked the others and found that they’d actually sent as four 2TB drives and three 1TB drives. Score! So, we divided our spoils evenly, and I ended up with 3TB instead of 2TB. I’d planned on moving my old drives into the server anyway, including my anime/video drive so that I didn’t need to keep it all on my main PC, and just keep the two new 1TB drives in there. Now I’ve done that and have so much extra space, I’ve got nothing to do with it all. Managing data gets a bit difficult once you get so much, I still need to go through and delete some redundant data on my server, then figure out how I’m going to organise it all.

I’m finally gonna start using my Steam account as well, as I just got Portal for free. I might even buy another game as well, now that I have a bit of money. Maybe Half-Life 2 or Counterstrike: Source, or Garry’s Mod. Or maybe something entirely different, depending on what I find. Any other ideas? Let me know.

That’s all I’ve got for this entry right now actually, I thought I had a bit more to say about techinal things, but I guess not. I’ll have to make another entry if something else comes up.

Ciao!

-Lachy

Woo! I finally found a decent poll system to add to my entries. It’s kinda weird how all of the plugins rated 5-stars were actually mostly useless.

I plan on using polls quite often in the future, so tell me how you feel about polls now, in poll form!

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This must be the most annoying, yet hilarious ad ever. I felt the urge to post it here.

Enjoy.

Has anyone else tried the Personas plugin for FireFox yet? It’s basically a light-weight theme switcher in Firefox, that allows you to easily switch between themes and acquire new ones in a second. I really like this, it’s much faster and easier on the eyes than those bulky themes you have to download and install individually.

You can get it here: http://www.getpersonas.com/

The other goo dhting is when you’re browsing through the list of personas in the Tools menu, your browser automatically previews the highlighted persona. The same thing applies while viewing the site’s gallery too.

Anyway, if I’m going to go on raving about how good this plugin is, how could I not show a screenshot of it in use? Here it is: (You can’t go wrong with Hitsugaya. )

Hitsugaya! =D

I’ve just set up a FeedBurner account for my blog, though I have no idea if it’s working or not. I’ve also set up the FeedSmith widget which should redirect my normal RSS feed to feedburner, but I’m not sure how it’s suppsoed to operate and appear. So far I’ve got 0 subscribers in my FeedCount, even though a few people definitely have subscribed through FeedBurner itself.

I’m not sure about FeedSmith, whether it will count people who have already subscribed or not. I wish it wasn’t so confusing… To make it easier for me, please subscribe to to my new FeedBurner RSS feed. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/LachysBlog?format=xml

Thanks. Well, it’s back to studying for my software exam tomorrow for me.

Ciao.