Category: Computers
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Hard gamers choice: Athlon64 X2 5200+ vs. Core 2 Duo E6400
Steven Walton, of LegionHardware, has been doing a very interesting comparison. He’s interested in getting the best possible CPU for a gamer willing to pay around $220 for his CPU. This is a nice price point because it seems to be around what most gamers are ready to pay to have a fast machine, and…
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Silent X1950 pro
When you deal with high-end graphic cards (high-end both in terms of performance and price), you soon discover that you are spaeking about racing machines eating a lot of energy, needing a very efficient cooling solution and usually bragging about their performance through the sound of noisy fans. Here comes the announcement expected for very…
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AMD-ATI R600 first to full HDMI
Reminder R600 = X2800 boardsR630 = X2600 boardsR610 = X2300 boards We were wondering why the R6x0 family of graphics chipsets from AMD-ATI was so late compared to the 8800 family of boards from nVidia. Part of the answer may come from the fact that AMD-ATI made a move toward full integration of HDMI (High…
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The Y2K7 bug
On the 1st of January 2000, some people were expecting to see the world crumble because old software applications had been written using dates coded on 2 digits. At the turn of the century (or rather at the change from 99 to 00), there was a need for upgrading/patching applications to support 4-digit years in…
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Repairing a PC
Among the various things I have been looking into while trying to identify the origin of PC crashes I have already been disucssing (I was looking for possible explanations in the possible death of RAM memory), I went and checked the graphics card. Apparently, there lies the origin of my recent PC problems. It appears…
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Testing RAID-1 on OpenSUSE
As I described in another post, I wanted to test RAID technology on my GNU/Linux OpenSUSE configuration. In the previous post, I have shown how to create/install the RAID array. Now my intent is to see what happens when a hard drive fails, as it is supposed to protect me against it. But I prefer…
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PC intensive care
I am currently in the middle of a string of problems quite annoying on one of my home PCs. Apparently randomly, and more and more often, it stops, locks down or reboots without warning. If I don’t use the PC, it may take a long time; But when I am trying to work (with OpenOffice,…
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Upgrade to Vista without an installed Windows
Information tidbit coming (indirectly) from Microsoft. It is possible to install a Vista upgrade even without having a previously installed Windows (it is quite interesting because of the tremendous price difference between full Vista and upgrade Vista). Apparently, according to Paul Thurrott, you only have to follow the steps: Boot on the upgrade Vista DVD…