On friday night, I brought my PC over to my buddy Nettles house & upgraded the box. We put in the Intel Quad Core CPU/mobo along with the 4G RAM & 150 G Raptor X hdd (I bought the hdd & ram last year but didn't have time to do anything with it because of time-consuming grad school).

The old PC had an 80G hdd in it that was split into a C & D partition...for the past 5 years I thought I was using 2 hdds! Boy did I feel stupid. I also found that my vidoe card was using the ancient AGP connection, not PCI express. My bad, once again. What we did was put the C drive from the old hdd onto the Raptor & kept the D drive in its own partition. We reformatted the old partition which as become the "F" drive. However, with Partition Tragic, I'll be eventually making the entire old hard drive its own D drive.

The end result will be a C drive Raptor X and a D drive (old 80G EIDE hdd). The eventual plan is to replace the 80G EIDE drive with a 500G SATA drive sometime in the near future. I skimped on buying a new hdd right away so I could save a few bucks on the upgrade cost.

Further, since my old video card was an ATI X800 AGP video card, I had to replace that. New mobos don't have AGP. So I got a $27 ATI videocard from Nettles for the time being. New ATI video cards are out in August, so I figured I would need to wait to upgrade that. Also, I was informed that I might need to replace my Enermax power supply with a power supply with more wattage to handle a high end video card.

To protect my Raptor X, I've ordered an hdd cooler. I'm really disappointed in the high price. About $38 after including the $8 shipping & handling! No stores around my area carry the Syntrin & those look the best. Finally, I've come to the conclusion that my 5 year old case sucks. It's very bland & beige. I might go ahead & buy a new case from Newegg as well. They have a gamer case (black) for $70-80 after a $40 rebate.

Well, I think I'll wait until I switch energy providers. I'm getting raped by my electric company so I might have to get the power turned off until I can get switched over to a better provider. I can't believe how ridiculous these electric bills are.

I'm thinking about getting a Quad Core Intel & a mobo that can handle the 4G RAM sticks I have. My "dealer" can sell me the cpu/mobo combo for $290. It's a bit more than I wanted to pay, but the cost for the cheaper stuff just doesn't seem as appealing, plus the quad core ought to be quite fast.

The whole point in upgrading was to ensure that my PC could play Spore. My theory was that Spore didn't like ATI cards, but liked nVidia. My PC at my parent's house I thought had an nVidia card in it & he we had swapped out ATI for nVidia. But I was wrong! We swapped out for ATI as the nVidia card didn't work for Maxis Sim's games! The PC at my parent's is an ATI X700 & the one in my place is an ATI X800. So it looks like I just need to reinstall the OS.

However, I figure if I need to reinstall the OS, I might as well do some upgrading too. I think at this point, I will just keep the X800 video card & upgrade it later to a superior ATI model. I have read on this site that ATI is coming out with a high end, cheap gamer video card for $200 that I may be interested in.

Last Saturday, I spent almost the entire day dealing with Tech Support for Norton's Ghost 14 product, trying to install and configure it on my PC at my parent's house. Man, what a pile of crap it was! They still haven't fixed it & it has been escalated to development. However, I can't blame them entirely. I have 2 licenses & used the other for my place's PC. It installed fine there & I have completed a full backup & setup incremental backups monthly. It has some interesting features. For one, it can hook up to Google Desktop indexes for recovery. It also uses Symantec Threat-con levels. If the security threat is up on Threat-con, it can do a backup of your system. Incremental backups will save space as it only backups up the updates to the main installation. It also has encryption, but the encryption doesn't work with Google Desktop so they are mutually exclusive features.

I've been told that Acronis True Image is the best PC backup system. However, I get my licenses for Ghost at $15 each, so that's why I'm using it. The feature set is similar between the two products. Bottomline is: if you can get Ghost to work on your PC, or have a freshly built PC to install it on & succeed on install, then you'll be happy with it.

I also bought 2 boxes of Norton 360 version 2 for $15 each. I kinda screwed myself as one box of Norton 360 gives you 3 licenses. Unlike Ghost, the new Norton 360 version 2 installed & setup perfectly on the PC at my parent's house. Last year when Norton 360 version 1 was released, if you had downloaded the "free add on pack", it would hose N360 & the product would demand to be reinstalled. It took a few uninstalls & reinstalls before I realized that the crappy add-on pack was the culprit. The add-on pack generally includes a spam filter for your email client. But who really uses email clients anymore? I'll be installing this on my place's PC tonight to see how it goes & how it gels with Norton Ghost.

Last up is Symantec/Norton PC Anywhere, which I also got for $15. I never have used it but plan on getting it working. At one time I had it installed, but during the troubleshooting of N360 version 1, the support reps blew away PC Anywhere. At any rate, I want it back on my PC & want to be able to make use of it. I'm pretty sure PC Anywhere, Ghost, & N360 is the entire suite of tools from Norton that one needs..not sure what's left after that. N360 comes with some sort of defragment/performance tool, but the defrag is very simplified. I'll need to look elsewhere for a good defrag tool. Probably Paragon Software's Total Defrag. It's a software that can do a bootable/low-level defragmentation. I just hope it all works together. Otherwise, I'll be writing up a few batch files to run to shutdown these services when I play a game. I'll post about this in another blog in the coming days. :-)

John

Time to upgrade my PC. What a hassle. Last year, there were two sales. One for a Raptor X 150G and another for 4G RAM. I got both but then never had time to upgrade my PC. So I'm getting around to it now. It looks like I'm going to upgrade the videocard, power supply, mobo, CPU, & keep everything else the same.

You know how when you upgrade to a new PC you usually say goodbye to all your installs, programs, and data and then after the upgrade, you want to go back and look at your old PC but you can't? Well now there is an easy way to fix that. I'm using VMware Converter, a free tool, that will convert my old PC into a virtual machine. Then after I upgrade, I can load up VMware & reference my old PC as if it were still alive. :-) This is going to help me tremendously. I might even keep it around if I can find a use for it. I doubt I'll play any games over it, but I can at least see what I had installed & then install it on my new physical machine & subsequently uninstall it on my VMware image.

It sounds like there are some really interesting possibilities with this. For instance, after my new PC is built, I can turn it into a virtual machine as well, to use as a backup. I would need to find out how I could turn the virtual machine back into a physical machine for the backup though, otherwise, there isn't much point. I don't know how much I'll use this feature since I recently ordered Norton Ghost to be my backup facility. I'll do some more digging & maybe I can find a way to have them work together for backup and restore purposes.

UPDATE: Well, it appears that VMware's v2p (virtual to physical) migration process states the following:

"The process for Microsoft guest operating system environments includes the use of Microsoft ysprep 1.1 and a disk imaging tool such as Symantec Ghost."

So it looks like Ghost is already a desirable thing to have for moving from a virtual machine to a physical machine. Groovy.

I've spent a lot of time here but I think it's starting to interfere with my actual quality game time. I'm going to reduce my visitation a bit so I can get back to playing all these games I own in the evenings and weekends. You'll probably still hear from me more than you'd like though. :-)

That's right. Now you can own an Xbox 360 for $200 bucks.

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=201975275&adid=17654&dcaid=17654

Need to go laugh at this person after/if Spore succeeds. He says it's going to be crap. I say it isn't. Need to be there to tell him so when it happens. :-) User: xgalacticax

His exact words:

"It will really be funny if little big planet and spore turn out to be rubbish. The things u can do in them seem like fun but a couple of hours or days after, ud get bored of it. I remember how everyone was like ...Assasins Creed is the best game ever...before it came out. And I was like "It will probably be crap..I mean, how can u say its the best game ever when u havent played it". I was there to laugh when I heard all the tales of disappointment when it came out. I liked Assasins Creed and completed it but I think its because I wasnt hyped on it b4 it came out. When ur hyped on something, even the slightest flaw can make u hate it. I see Little Big Planet and Spore suffering the same fate."