Saturday 24 July 2010

Server Crash

Unfortunately about 36hours ago the Hard Drive in my web server decided to end its little spinning life. Although the site has been restored from a couple of backups some of the file download links are not working.

The files are still available but I need to fix the download links - please be patient :)

For anyone running download monitor out there, the newer update changed the DB table names. Don't do what I did or rather didn't....  and forget to change the SQL backup scripts to reflect these changes.

Wednesday 7 July 2010

PC Design Lab - new case

I just got an email update from PC Design Lab regarding their new case. Those of you who follow the blog will know my ComputeCube machine is built into their QMicro2 case, which has been really good with only one or two tiny niggles. Although in fairness they are caused by the the amount of power cables and the heat emitted by the Asus rampage 2 gene northbridge arrangement and the Tesla C1060.

The new case looks good and their have adopted the suggestions from their clients. You may have a look at the new pre-order case here.  Even though they have raised the cage I would have liked it to be slightly taller to help with airflow over the GPU's and power cable routing.  Strangely they mention it can now support 750w power supplies, but I have been running a 1250w one in the older case for a while now with no problems.

The radiator bracket is a really good idea and would have helped sort out the Rampage 2 Genes overheating northbridge rather nicely.

If you are looking for a SFF case in my opinion there is nothing better out there and this new model raises the bar even further.  Now if I could only get my hands on the new one and a watercooling kit :)

Tuesday 6 July 2010

Windows 7

While ordering a replacement power supply for one of my machines I decided to add a Windows 7 to the shopping cart.

This was in no small part prompted by the NVidia parallel nsight addin for visual studio which would not work on my XP machines. An additional contributing factor was the lack of SP3 for Windows XP Pro x64. Of course the new office 2010 will only run on XP SP3, Vista and Windows 7.

Having had a brief and scary encounter with Windows Vista I am pleasantly surprised with the new version of Windows.  Microsoft have done a good job with this one.

The installation process had to be a "clean" one as there is no upgrade path from winXP x64. I took a full backup of my "ComputeCube" machine and without bothering to format the C drive just popped the DVD in and rebooted.