Henk van de Goor's Bloggers@large

I have been playing this quite some hours now. This stuff is seriously addictive :-)

Wow, I'm impressed with my new PC for sure. It's a blast for real. I don't know where to begin telling what I like about it, but let's start with the fact that it's blazing fast compared to my P4 2.8ghz. Vista is very responsive and everything worked straight away out of the box. Windows Media Center is really cool! I very much enjoy watching TV on my Pc and having a DVR (digital video recorder). The program guide works well and I had no trouble installing the IR-remote. The 20" flat screen is very nice looking and is pixel perfect.

And the videocard performs just... awesome! I installed a bunch of games like Battlefield 2 and they al perform very well at the highest resolutions. I was particulary impressed with Half-Life2. It just looks visually stunning! HDR (High Dynamic Range) is looking very nice. And even at 1680x1050 with everything turned on high detail and 6xAA on it got a 135fps doing the performance test.

I did install Crysis and it looks very nice with all details on very high; I haven't had a chance yet to benchmark that but it really is cool to have a PC that is able to run anything I throw at it.

The only thing is that I now have to re-arrange my 7 PC's so this one fits in somewhere ;-)

So call me a risk taker - living on the edge of reason - but yesterday I ordered myself a Dell XPS 420 desktop PC. Before I get into the technical specs of my new PC let me explain how I ended up with a Dell. I have been looking for a new PC for a few weeks now. At first I considered buying a laptop. I had my eyes on the Dell XPS M1330, a nice, small laptop with good specs; you can order it with a nice 13,3" LED backlit screen (better lighting and less power consumption). But knowing myself and what I use my PC for (a lot of gaming), I figured I could get a better deal on a desktop - as laptops still are a lot more expensive and have lesser specs. I wanted to spend about 1200 Euro's and the laptops I looked at (with the specs I want) are a lot more expensive.

So I ditched the idea of buying a laptop and started to research what specs I would need to get a new, fast desktop multimedia PC that at least can run a game like Crysis smoothly. Crysis - at the moment - is a game that is so heavy on your GPU that if you have the hardware to run it, you can damn well run virtually any other game out there without any problems. In fact: getting a good benchmark with Crysis is the holy grail for many video card manufacturers.

To cut a long story short: you need at least a nVidia Geforce 8800 series videocard to run this game. The 8800 series currently has three models: the GTS, the GT and the GTX. The GTS is bottom of the line, the GTX top of the line (which means you pay way too much for it) and - you guessed it - the GT is positioned in the middle. The 8800 GT outperforms it's rivals ATI HD2900XT and ATI HD3870 in most situations. But the really cool thing about the 8800 GT is, that it performs only slightly less (10-15%) than the GTX, but is a lot cheaper; making it a smart choice for gamers.

Having settled that (choice of GPU), the rest was easy: Intel easily outperforms AMD when they came up with the Dual Core (used to be the other way around), so I was going for the Intel platform. Other than that you want off course an optical drive (DVD +/-RW), a fast hard disk and components that work together well (memory, motherboard etc.).

I started to compare prices for systems with these specs online and I found out that Dell actually has systems that are very competitive in terms of specs and pricing! There are several Dutch companies that can build you a custom PC, but I found out that they are actually about 20-40% higher(!) than Dell with the XPS series. Also I found out that delivery time on those PC's can be as much as 20-30(!) workings days and you still pay for delivery!

After all the comparing of specs and prices I still kept ending up with the Dell XPS 420. It has good base specs that you can tweak yourself, which I like a lot. In fact; every Dell you order is assembled by hand according to your personal specs. Now, I am aware of the bad reputation that Dell has with some people, but the people that I know that actually own a Dell PC (either private or business) are pretty happy with Dell's service and support. So I figured: why not.

So what did I end up with and what did it cost me? Well, here is the low-down:

My Dell XPS 420 specs:

Dell XPS Casing with Windows SideShow
Viiv Q6600 Quad Core Processor 2.40GHz, 1066Mhz FSB, 8MB cache
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 800MHz Memory (standard 667Mhz)
512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT GPU
640GB Serial ATA2 Raid 0 Stripe (2x320GB) 7200Rpm Dual HDD
DVD+/-RW (Read/Write) 16x and CD-RW (Read/Write)/DVD-ROM (Reader) 48x
Integrated HDA 7.1 Dolby Digital soundcard
TV Tuner and AVIO / Accellerator
19-in-1 Bluetooth Media Card Reader
USB 2.0 and FW 400/800
20.1'' Wide Screen Flat Panel (TCO99) DVI-D HDCP-compliant 1680 x 1050 / 60 Hz

Looking at the combination of CPU, GPU, fast RAM and the RAID 0 hard disk configuration this system should really perform well with games and other multi-media (i.e.; editing video).

And the best thing of all: the above configuration costs me exactly € 1205,- with no delivery costs. Because of that, and the fact that I had a coupon that gave me an extra 10% discount on any configuration, I threw in the 20" widescreen flat panel screen. Without that, it would have been € 1026,- So, not only am I right on budget, I think I got a very good deal for a mid-range to high-end system.

Dollar vs Euro
Some blogs ago I bitched about the fact that although the Dollar is very low against the Euro, you do not benefit from that with - let's say - Apple. This is not the case with Dell! My Dell XPS 420 costs exactly € 1205,- and - as said - includes a 20" wide screen. Now, when you go over to the US Dell website, and you configure the 420 with (roughly) the same specs as the one I ordered, you end up with a total around $1799 Dollars (note that the US version of the 420 has 3gb of RAM standard, and does not come with RAID 0 stripe but RAID 1). So at least Dell has the decency to not rip you off.

Are there any downsides? Yeah: the system comes with Microsoft Vista (ugh!!). I rather would have had it with good old XP.

I should receive my spanking new system before or on Thursday January 17th. That's 9 working days guys. Not 20 or 30 as with their Dutch competitors who - by the way - do not deliver a 20" flat panel, nor a RAID configured system for anything near €1200.

To be continued!

One of the more annoying things in life is trying to help a friend with a computer problem; i.e. playing helpdesk. It's frustrating because your friend on the other line has a problem but they do not have a clue what they are doing. Otherwise they did not need to ask you for help. If you try to help them over a phone and you need to tell them word for word what to do, it just adds to the frustration. If I encounter a problem it usually is something that I can fix in 5 minutes or less because I know where to look and what to do. I know my mind usually works out multiple scenarios and if one doesn't fix it, I am already working the next one. Being on the phone slows down that process and just makes it more difficult. The best way for me to fix someone's problem is to physically get behind their PC and just do it. However, I know plenty of people that do not exactly live around the corner so that makes it impossible to do that. Off course the computer industry has a solution for that too; "remote desktop". It enables you to remotely control a PC over the Internet and work with it as if it is your own computer.
Sounds good, but the problem is that firewalls and internet modems or routers usually do not allow for this. Which means you need to "open up a remote portnumber" in the firewall/router. And trying to explain how to do that over a phone is - well - like a brain surgeon trying to explain to a monkey how to remove a tumour: it's a certified "mission impossible".

Luckily there are people way more intelligent and smart than myself - called programmers - that had the same annoyance and they have come up with a remote desktop program that is secure, safe to use and, most important: hassle free to install.

So here is my tip of the day for all you out there that want to help your fellow computer users but always run into the same frustrating over-the-phone helpdesk like conversations: use cSpace. cSpace is a no-hassle solution that will help you help others. No need to set up difficult things, just install and start using it. Because people can see what you actually do, they learn from what you do and hopefully they don't need more help.

I have now installed this program on the PC's of about four people and it works excellent. So do yourself a favour and start using this!

Yesterday I finally bought another external harddisk: an Iomega 2.5" firewire/usb 2.0, 160gb. I have a Mac PowerBook G4 and some time agao I made the mistake of splitting the internal 80gb harddisk into 2 partions: one for my applications and one for my data. Off course I always ran out of space on my application partition because of the very annoying way OS X uses swapspace. I tried to relocate that swap parttion to my Data parttition but whatever fancy utility I tried, it did not work. So I just wanted to switch back again to one big - well "biggish" - partition.

But in order to do that I had to have a bootable external disc (firewire). So I bought one and cloned my harddrive (took about 2 1/2 hours for each partition) and erased my 80gb harddrive, cloned everything back and started cleaning up as thing were messed up a bit (dock wouldn't start). But after running Applejack it worked like a charm again.

To cut a long story short; I have reclaimed my harddisk and now I have a good extra harddrive. The cool part is that I have cut the Iomega in 2 partitions, one with Apple journaling etc. and the other using NTFS. Now, as you might know OS X can read NTFS, but not write to it. Well lucky you: if you want to write to your external NTFS drive as well, just head over to Lifehack.org and read the article "How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X".

Enjoy!