Well I just did it again. Recently while just “window shopping” with a friend, I came across this product from Logitech:
It’s the Logitech G105 Gaming Keyboard. Now, I’ve been meaning to get a backlit keyboard for awhile now. However, they are still expensive to me. Usually they cost about S$150 (US$119 or so). Imagine to my surprise and glee, that this one was only S$65. It was a no-brainer. The “window shopping” resulted in me lugging home this keyboard and quickly setting it up.
Currently I’m sorta “forced” into going on vacation. I have too many vacation days leftover from the previous year and the company says I need to go on one, RIGHT NOW!
So here I am.
So I was just talking to a gaming buddy yesterday about… yeah games, what else. During the discussion we were just talking about system specs and such, and suddenly I thought – why not? It’s been almost 3 years since I had my “budget” PC. At the time when I got it, I was under some financial restrictions and had to “make do”. Again, I went to Bell Systems on the 5th floor of Sim Lim Square. Again, the guy there was helpful and suggested a few cost-saving items. All in all, eventually I got a pretty dang good system – AMD Phenom 2 1055T (6 cores), 8 GB DDR 1333 RAM, ATI Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and the usual chassis, DVD drives etc. The only thing I didn’t get was the hard disk. I was going to bring the old one over from the previous PC, and let Windows auto-detect everything on the new one. After all, I just just done a reformat recently back in June. I don’t want to go through all that again!
True enough, once I got home and moved the harddisk over and booted the new PC up, Win7 autodetected the changes, needed me to re-activate it, and I just had to re-install my Catalyst drivers and everything was back! Continue reading Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) Pitfalls→
This is probably going to be one of my shortest posts.
When I first installed Windows 7, I was initially worried about the compatibility problems that I may have if I had installed the 64 bit version just like I had with WinXP 64-bit. Many software didn’t have a 64-bit version, and still don’t. However after about a year, I’ve seen almost no difference in terms of compatibility between Win7 32-bit and Win7 64-bit.
Further, recently my PC started acting really strangely – it would hang or freeze at random times and I couldn’t pinpoint it at all.
Also, I have been running Windows 7 for over a year now. It’s about the right time for a full reformat anyway.
Since I have my C: drive as a standalone partition, wiping it out and reformatting it is not much of a problem. My data (ie documents, pictures, savegames etc) is safely tucked away in other partitions. Also, having a NAS helps somewhat too, since all your stuff are actually not on the PC but on a network drive somewhere.
Thus I decided now would be a good time to reformat and go up to 64-bit.
Long story short, after booting up Win7 64-bit for the first time, the weird problems of hanging and freezing persisted. Thus it couldn’t be a software problem, had to be hardware-related. I spent a day thinking about this, wondering what I needed to swap out/upgrade. I even began looking at prices for CPUs (the chip, not the computer case), motherboards, RAMs etc.
Eventually I narrowed it down to my old 5-year-old 250GB harddisk. I wish I had installed a SMART monitor for the harddisk. I had enabled SMART in the BIOS but didn’t follow up by installing a monitor for it, so when the harddisk started to fail I was unaware. Anyway now I do, so the same thing shouldn’t happen again, I hope!
You know what I hate about reformatting?
After the reformat I would have to re-install EVERYTHING.. my Firefox, my Thunderbird, my games, etc. One saving grace is Steam – whatever games I had installed under Steam is all right back when I re-installed the Steam client.
Rants and Ramblings of a Typical Kiasu Singaporean
