(no subject)

[greatbear]

Well, my latest PC creation died a sudden death yesterday. It appears the RAM is faulty. I dont have any extra DDR2-800 sticks laying around, so I cant do a simple swap to test. This is Corsair XMSPro memory, which should be good stuff. Looking closely at the things, though, it seems that both sticks have chips on either end that have gaps between the chip surface and the heatspreaders. My thinking is that the RAM ran hot for the month or so that it was running and gave out. If it's something more than this, I am completely scrapping the machine save for the five hard drives and the sound card and starting completely from scratch once again. The box is cursed, and never managed to work properly for any length of time. That will mean four grand of hardware going into the trash.

In the meantime, I am going to buy a cheap Mac. At least I can get a mild discount at the Apple store.

In other news, I finally got a chance to swap out the bent rims on the MINI and check it out for suspension damage. I found nothing obvious, and the only indication that anything is still wrong is the steering wheel not centered while driving. No pulling, shimmying or handling anomalies, so that's a good thing. After I unload the firewood from the truck I will toss the other wheels along with the new ones and have the tires swapped between the old and new SSR Type C RS rims. As for the new rims, I am disappointed in them. The construction, while solid, is not the same as the original SSR Competitions, which were a one-piece forged construction. The new style uses a forged hub/spoke/outer rim section welded to a forged inner rim section. This is a less elegant build method than the old style, but workable, and about a half pound heavier per rim. I have a feeling I will be selling these one day if I get the urge for something different. Time will tell I guess.

I wish I had more light in the evening after work. I hate standard time.

Comments

[md-mancub.livejournal.com]

A suggestion: Look into "Parallels Desktop For Mac" to run Windows instead of Boot Camp. I'm running it and doing some fairly intense computational stuff and it performs like a champ! The sound even works. :)

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I get all giddy when I see the 30" Mac Cinema display. I could live in that screen.

You have stumbled into one of the main reasons (aside from not being able to build one from parts) that I shy away from Macs over the years - the internal expandability is practically nonexistent. Given the usual extras I cram into my average PC, a equivalent Mac would be buried among all the external drives, interfaces, video and audio nonsense, etc.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I'm still slugging along with a 2G Celeron on a cheesy mATX board with a mere 400Mhz FSB and 740MB of RAM, that is, roughly 256MB and a 512MB 266 DDR sticks or something like that on the PC now and I'm trying to do video work - but not without problems.

If I could afford it, I'd get all the stuff and build a new PC from scratch, and it'll be my 2nd totoal build. The first one was done in 2001 with a slightly used Asus Motherboard, 800Mhz Athlong process and 512M of RAM with all the other components clommed from the dead PC, the drives, optical drives and floppy drive along with a new video card and audio card and a new case and did a an almost total upgade of it 2 years ago, which is the current setup I'm running now.

The next box will be based on the dual core P4 or AMD chip, possibly with hyper threading and at least 512MB of RAM.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

This one particular PC has been a total nightmare. As I said, I feel it's cursed. I enjoy building PCs, setting them up to exactly what I want, tweaking and tuning, messing with hardware, etc. I push the limits with some of the hardware and never had problems like this. Yeesh.

[md-mancub.livejournal.com]

I'd offer to help you set up your Mac, but it's so simple, you won't need me. If you want an Apple Store buddy to tag along, I'll go! :)

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I'll probably go sometime during the week, seeing I am up in PA for the weekend. I'll (somehow) let you know when I intend to go! I am a perennial Mac n00b. lol

I'm wondering when I am going to run into you guys at Bloom!

[psuweightlifter.livejournal.com]

I love my Macbook pro. Yeah, for grant money to buy me stuff like that! I could never afford anything like that on my own. I'm running parallels desktop for mac and seems to be working well, it's got quirks that I haven't quite figured out yet. This summer, I'll run all my crystallography software on it and see what happens.

[robypikkus.livejournal.com]

If you really bought a mac, feel free to ask me any question. I'd be glad to help you out, even though I believe that Mac is so user-friendly you won't need any help... :)