Life Update
Hello folks. I keep promising to update this blog, but have been lax. Oh well.
Here goes: I have been at home these last few days due to an infection/inflammation/medical mystery in my right foot. It is swollen and painful on the top. I am waiting on blood tests to help determine what is going on. On the positive side, it could be just an infection (like my arm last year) and a little antibiotics will knock it out. On the negative, well, let’s just not talk about that event.
I did get some nice anti-inflammatory meds (very good stuff) and some pain meds (very, very good stuff. I don’t need it , will use it, um, when needed)
The boy is growing up big! He has half his teeth in, and he’s only 8 months old! We still wonder if his heart is doing ok, but we are not going to be suckered in again by crappy doctoring. His pediatrician has noted nothing abnormal, and we trust him very much.
I am building a new computer, or at least have been building. I will get my video card in today, so we should be almost ready to fire it up.
The specs:
Intel Q6600 2.4 GHz Core 2 Quad. Yeah, the QX6700 would have been nice, or even the Q6700, but this was the best proc in the budget.
Stock processor cooler. I will upgrade coolers and such later, if necessary, due to overclocking.
4 GB DDR2 Patriot PC2-6400 4-4-4-12 in 4 1GB sticks. Yeah, the OS will probably be XP and not use it, but the price was excellent. Besides, by distributing the memory across the buss, it should keep latencies at a minimum. Whoo hoo.
Gigabyte GZ-FA1CA-ASB Aurora case. This thing is HUGE inside! I love this case. Toolless installation of cards and drive bays is awesome. Best case ever.
Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus motherboard, socket 775 with nVidia 680i chipset. NICE. 1066 MHz FSB!
3 Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 320 GB drives in RAID 0. Yeah, I know they aren’t the fastest. But the 150GB Raptors are WAY expensive, and I got a deal on these. They are fast for 7200s. And yes, I know RAID 0 has no fault protection, but I am not keeping anything vital on them. All vital is NAS or other networked machines. Besides, RAID 0 is fast and gives me 960 GB to play with.
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W PSU. Yes, I got the copper colored one, and I bought it before they got bought out. This PSU acts like a 1000W stuffed into a 350W case. These guys know how to build PSUs. I have seen builds to far more with this little supply than I thought possible.
And finally:
EVGA GeForce 8800 Ultra KO / 768MB DDR3 / SLI Ready / PCI Express / Dual Link Dual DVI / HDTV / Video Card. Yeah, I splurged, but had this mighty hefty gift card to this particular vendor. I was going to go with dual 320 GB GTS, but I thought: why not? This one unit has more memory that those two cards. Besides, if I get some more dough, I can always get another card (like a GTX) to run as a SLI companion.
Oh yes, that will drive my 22” LCD widescreen that I have had for a while.
And yes, I will run Flight Simulator X on the new machine. I probably won’t go to Vista until SP2. By that time, all the driver bugs and such will be worked out. Too bad I have to go to Vista to get DirectX10. Vista is crapola.
Anyways, drop a line if you get a chance. I am bored sitting around the house.
L8rs-
For the readers on Blogger, yes this is a cross post from my other blogsites. I will continue to post here, but if you want to catch up with my life:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/mikestermike
http://blog.myspace.com/mikestermike
http://mikestermike.livejournal.com/
