heimic.net » Hardware

Desk mount monitor arm installed

michaelf — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:21:32 +0000

Thought about getting a desk mount monitor arm for a while, so decided to ask for it as a gift. Below is a photo of it installed and the Kogan TV I use as a monitor/tv attached. Think it’s great, allows me to have the work space available once again below it.

All I need to do now is to clean up since installing it and store stuff. Excuse my messy workstations

Darwyn is testing it out for me by watching some Octanauts.

HP Proliant N40L

michaelf — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 02:29:12 +0000

I know am a little behind, but I too am considering the purchase of a HP Prolian Microserver. Considering a N40L, which is the replacement to the N36L. With 4 x 2Tb drives, I figure it would make a good storage unit.

Will see how things pan out for a new year purchase, will wait for drives to drop in price again before these get purchased I think.

Thinking about getting an SSD after all.

michaelf — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 03:42:18 +0000

My birthday is around the corner, and I am out of ideas on what to get, but the first thing to spring to mind is an SSD. So considering the purchase of a Corsair Series 3 2.5″ 120Gb SSD. As found at the link here.

If you have an opinion, and/or recommendation. Drop me a comment. Thanks

Purchased another 8Gb of ram

michaelf — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 11:13:25 +0000

With the price of ram still dropping, I thought it was a good time to buy another 8Gb kit. So I did. My i5 2400 now has 16Gb of ram total. System seems to boot quicker just by adding the … Continue reading →

New mouse purchased

michaelf — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:31:14 +0000

I bought myself a Razer DeathAdder gaming mouse a while back and was waiting on it arriving. It arrived while I was on holidays.

Just plugged it in today and must say I am quite impressed. The tracking is so fast and the settings that can be changed using the Razer software is awesome.

Be interesting to see how I cope with it’s use in Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 (when it comes out in the next few days).

The packaging it came in was quite nice for a mouse, in fact the best packaging I have seen for a mouse ever. Highly recommend it at this stage.

Excellent Service

michaelf — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:15:11 +0000

You have to give thanks where it is deserved.

I’d like to give a thanks to Arc Computers in Liverpool, who assisted me today with the swapping of a front case (and all associated cables/PCB’s) of a Fractal Design R3 Define case. My one had faulty USB ports, which I believe was due to the cable + PCB having issues. So they advised to bring it back in and they would swap it out. Sure enough they did today. And I am pleased to announce with it all installed back into my system, it’s working as expected.

Thanks, and will be happy to deal with them again in the future. Good prices and excellent service.

New machine – Intel i5 2400

michaelf — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 22:39:50 +0000

Purchased new bits to build an Intel i5 2400, as I wanted to get a reasonable good machine put together that will allow me to purchase and play battlefield3 when available in October.

Not only that it will allow me a bit more grunt for some of the virtual machines I been building to demonstrate CommVault Simpana features etc.

I am using an old Video card at the moment, but plan on spending the last $330 or so dollars on a ATI 6970 as they start to drop in price, probably in a months time (or two).

Got a few pictures of the bits and the case showing the cable routing I did to try and make things tidy. That way the only cables over the place will be the sata ones etc.

Purchases from Dell Outlet site

michaelf — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:13:02 +0000

Was going to build up a machine to use for the Hyper-V labs I need to do later this year, when I finally get up to the books dealing with it. However kept looking around at other options.

I purchased a Dell Desktop Opitplex 760 over 12 months ago, and have been extremely happy with it. It’s powerful, quiet and does everything I need it to do.

Noticed a number of Dell Desktop Optiplex 780′s show up on the Dell Outlet site, so after due consideration decided to buy one. In addition, I also bought a netbook too, mainly brought on by the loss of my iPhone. Bought an Inspiron 1012 from the same Dell Outlet site. Got both items for under 1K delivered, so pretty happy about that. Under my budget I had planned.

Now we just have to wait for them to ship and then arrive.

Mythtv and PS3

michaelf — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:26:43 +0000

As per Simon Rumble I found the PS3 to have a reasonable good UPnP client too. Although the PS3 wouldn’t play back recordings that had obivously had some modifications done. ie. cutlist changes etc.

Once the recording goes into nuv format, the PS3 won’t have a chance in hell to play it. I did some tinkering and managed to setup a custom job to honour the cutlist and maintain the mpg file format. However once the 2nd install of the configuration this failed to work. 1st time I did it on a setup it worked fine. I never did get around to working it out, maybe I might again in due time.

I just noticed that the HDHomeRun units are now available in Australia. HDHomeRun is a dual DVBT tuner that connects onto your ethernet and of course MythTv can then be configured to use the unit, or multiple units. Other software on other operating systems also support it. ie. EyeTV on MacOS X etc.

Having just seen these units now available, I am pretty keen to pick up one in the near future. I have a bit of funds to use on computer items, so I think I will get one once the funds in question are available for my use again.

Of course this means setting up a virtual machine to run mythtv is very possible, as the tuner is accessed via ethernet, so no fancy pci or usb hardware to consider under the guest itself.

Lots of screen resolution = sweet

michaelf — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:08:25 +0000

Just purchased a Benq E2200HD LCD monitor. It’s a 21.6″ widescreen with 1920 x 1080 resolution. Has d-sub, DVI and HDMI 1.3 inputs.

All I can say is that running at native resolution is unreal. It’s like literally having dual monitors, as the screen resolution is so high.

Will have to hook up the work laptop to it when I am working remote, as it will make life so much easier. Very impressed.

All I need now is for the onboard ATI 3200HD video card to be much more widely supported on Ubuntu/Linux. In the meantime 2D use works well enough so I think a Ubuntu 8.10 desktop install will be in order, as I think a Ubuntu/Linux system would be good on this system. Will then run VMware Workstation for any Windows XP Pro guests I need to use.

Monitor was a good price too, they retail for about $239 – $249 which is a good buy, considering a few years ago my first 17″ analog LCD monitor was $705 or so (which is still going).