For Christmas, I got the following items:

*RCA Stereo Headphones (with reinforced cable)
*8GB Sandisk Cruzer Flash Drive
*”Bully” Game for Wii
*”The Orange Box” Game for Xbox 360
*Garmin nuvi 200 GPS
*50pk DVD-R, 100pk CD-R

So all in all a good Christmas. We figured out that because o sales, clearance, bargain shopping and luck, we saved over $700 as a family.

Acer AM1100-B1300A Desktop:

1.9GHz AMD Athlon X2
1GB DDR
ATI Radeon X1200 Graphics
250GB SATA HDD

Vista/Win7 System Score: 2.9 (P-4.4/M-3.9/G-3.1/GG-3.3/HD-2.9)

Acer Aspire One Netbook:

1.6GHz Intel Atom Processor
1GB DDR Memory
GMA950 Graphics
160GB Hard Drive
Windows XP SP3

CPUMark 2.1: 2191.6 (1200.5/200.1/1939.2)
CPU Free Benchmark 2.2: 74.87 seconds
Vista/Win7 System Score: 2.3 (P-2.9/M-4.4/G-2.3/GG-3.0/HD-5.4)
PCMark05: 1575
3DMark2001se: 2791
3DMark06: 112

HP Pavilion 724c:

2.53GHz Pentium 4 Processor
768MB DDR Memory
nVidia GeForce 3 64MB Graphics (upgrade from 845 on-board)
80GB Hard Drive
Windows XP SP3

CPUMark 2.1: 3364.2 (1680.7/213.6/3151.3)
CPU Free Benchmark 2.2: 46.60 seconds
Vista/Win7 System Score: Untested
PCMark05: 1852
3DMark2001se: 7630 (~1500 for Intel 845 on-board)
3DMark06: 23 (Not lying; Used SwiftShader 2.0 Software Rendering; GF3 Unsupported)

Ok, small rant. Why on planet earth is NET Framework 3.5 192MB? NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 are both less than 25MB, so why is 3.5 so freaking big? And why is WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit) 992MB? I just want to install Vista on a Netbook over the network, but apprently you need WAIK to get into a VistaPE environment to mount the drive letter. On my “high speed” internet connection (512kbps down, fastest I can get here) it will take almost half a day to download! Half a day, then it will take maybe an hour to install Windows. It’s not even worth the effort at that rate! Stupid files need to take a hint and be less bloated. There are plenty of examples of slim software out there that puts things that are 5x it’s size to shame. uTorrent is a good example. uTorrent is less than 2MB and offers every feature a torrent client can have plus some. Azureus is a torrent client but it clocks in at 22MB plus the extra 20Mb Java you have to install to run it when it has no features over uTorrent and IMHO kills a PC’s resources. CUT THE FAT! STOP THE CODE BLOAT!

Okay, so that wasn’t so small…

I crossreferanced and compiled the ultimate list of games from all systems that should be played period:

Must Play Games:

BioShock
Burnout 3: Takedown
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Grand Theft Auto III
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto IV
Resident Evil 4
Rock Band
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
The Orange Box
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2

Must Play Series:

Castlevania
Final Fantasy
God of War
Gran Turismo
Halo
Mega Man
Metal Gear Solid
Metroid Prime
Sonic the Hedgehog
Super Mario
The Legend of Zelda

That’s all for now. Another CI Challenge coming soon!

We were down a few days because we tranferred out domain from Yahoo! (which was gonna charge $35 a year, ouch) to GoDaddy where it costs around $6 a year. Everything went as planned and we are now up and running on GoDaddy’s servers. Now to get cracking on projects and challenges and other mass mayhem…

Ok, so I didn’t actually destroy it, but in a way I did.  I got a fan and now it is cool and quiet, so no more Loud PC.  I got the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro.  Despite it being very very large, it does a really good job.  As I said in a previous post, I was getting an idle temp of 130F, and a full load temp of 170F, and that was with an external fan there to help the CPU fan, when I took that away, it was more like 150F and 190F respectively.  I put the Freezer 7 Pro on my CPU, and ran Prime 95, made sure I had 100% CPU utilization, and it was even running the torture test that produced the most heat.  My results were 136F with full load, and once I let it cool back down, which only took about 5 minutes, it was running at 104F idle.

Ok, so my PC is being very loud lately, and it has me concerned.  I have a 2.8GHz Pentium D, and according to the pros, the highest operable temperature is 145 F.  That is the maximum it should ever reach, and when it has a full load on it, it is reaching between 170 F and 180 F.  When it is idle, it is reaching 130 F, and that is with an external fan blowing on it, as well as the CPU fan, at full RPMs.  When I took the external fan away, and let it sit idle, it shoots up to 150 F.  Nick and I are going to try to pull the fan off and clean it, and re-apply thermal paste, and see if it helps, if not, looks like I will be getting a new fan.

Updating as they finish.

PCMark05: 8449 PCMarks

3DMark06: 12476 3DMarks

CPUMark 2.1: 11499.8

CPU Free Benchmark 2.2 (Formerly CPUMark): 19.45 secs

So I am biolding my uncle a gaming PC, nothing top of the line but good to handle most games at moderate settings. So I have speced it out with a Gigabyte Motherboard, 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo E8400, 4GB DDR2-800 Corsair Memory, 500GB Western Digital 16MB buffer 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive, a 460watt Silent Coller Master Power Supple, a GeForce 8800GT 512MB eVGA Graphics Card, and a slick looking CoolMax case. The graphics card came tonight (and is massive!) but the rest isn’t due here till next week (unless FedEx delivers it Saturday instead of Monday like UPS delivered the GFX card a day early.) Benchmarks and remarks are coming up. I know I am not gonna want to give this one up.