!!!UPDATE!!!: PICS.

open

boxed up

in situ

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Hey guys. You might recall a while back I was talking about making a home theater pc from scratch. Well I actually built it, and I’m typing this entry on the new computer. All in all I think it was a pretty positive experience. Some trial-by-fire aspects to it in terms of wiring up the motherboard to the case and power supply, but it was surprisingly fun. Came in way over-budget but I guess that’s how it goes. Specs are:

Nvidia Ion ITX-D mobo w/ Atom 330 chip (dual core @ 1.6 GHz)
HEC 8k mini ITX case
500 GB western digital HDD
4GB kingston DDR2 RAM
lite-on CD/DVD-RW drive

Initially planned on running XP, but my old install disk didn’t want to work – probably because it was a dell-branded OEM disk. I tried my best to get into Ubuntu but it didn’t want to install the proper drivers for the display I’m using and in general is not as user-friendly as advertised. As I mentioned to Rob, about 5 minutes after installing I was already having to do shit with a command-line interface. So long story short I’m now running Windows 7, which was a big part of the cost-overrun on my part. The breakdown goes like this:

$170 – mobo/processor combo
$50 – case w/ power supply
$80 – RAM
$40 – slimline dvd drive
$55 – digital hard disk
$20 – wireless keyboard/mouse combo
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$415 total + ~$100 for w7 and we’re not only $150 over budget, but at the point where I could have probably bought the stupid thing cheaper from Dell or wherever. One nice thing about rolling your own, though, is that the number of background processes running is much reduced from a vendor-built computer. Don’t have all the shitty bloatware running around and slowing everything down.

In any case, it was a good experience, and one I’d definitely recommend, but after having built it I’m not sure I’d do it again until component prices start to come down a little more. I also think I went a little overboard on some of the pieces – I probably could have cut costs a lot if I was making a computer that was primarily just for web-surfing rather than running a home theater pc. Get some shitty hard disk (or scavenge one), forget the optical drive, cut the RAM by half, and try and find a good linux distro and you’re back down below the $300 mark for a perfectly functional computer that’s using a top-of-the-line ultra-low-voltage processor.

I’ve been getting kind of into the idea of building my own computer for a while now, basically ever since Mark declared his intention to build a rig that could actually play new games.

First person shooters, especially those post-Dark Forces, have kind of scared and intimidated me, so I don’t know whether or not I’ll ever build anything “gaming” capable. Usually these days my taste in games runs more towards the casual escape-the-room type bullshit, anyways. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons to want to build my own computer.

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Sorry for the downtime last night. I had to do some needed upgrading and maintenance here. Wordpress updates pretty frequently for my taste. The latest upgrade adds a lot of changes to the administration side of things. So, dont be surprised if things look changed. Had to deactivate some plugins during the install.

omg you guys.

i wish i could have heard this presentation. this makes powerpoint look like a pile of puke.

One of the annoying things about installing Quicktime is that it changes certain file associations of your browser. Not only that, but the way to stop it is not obvious. In a break from writing music reviews and soliloquies about my life (actually, to be honest, I haven’t written much here at all recently and left most of that labor to zach) I thought I’d post a quick tech tip for anybody who is having a similar problem.

Problem: You installed Quicktime. Now whenever you click on a link to an .mp3 in Firefox it opens up the player, which is fine in some circumstances but sometimes you just want the prompt to save the file. I suppose you could right click and save link as but what happens if you’re not following a link or you just don’t want to deal with the crap.

Solution: In firefox open options which is in the Tools menu, click the content tab and you should see something like this.

Hit the manage button and you should get a window called download actions. Find the file formats that you don’t want qt to open and change them to ’save them on my computer.’ That’s all there is to it. Of course, I’m not a firefox expert, this is just something that happened to work for me, use at your own peril!