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Archive Category: Computers
Frustration Nation
Tuesday, 19 November 2002
oh….I am v.frustrated….I have too much to do! It’s driving me nuts that I am at work with this kick-ass connection to the net and yet can’t tweak up this page and have too many other things I need to be doing to feel good about doing it at home. [clutches head] Tomorrow I have to go to a workshop at the Bureau of Meteorology on Snow Probability Forecasts [downcast]….argh. I have two free nights this week and one of them is going to be repairing Mung’s computer….which, at this stage, I would prefer to throw from my office window because: 1) then it would be gone forever 2) fresh air would get in I have to write two website reviews by Friday of Media Watch Youth and Girls Inc. - this is while I’m learning Sneeze songs, and…omigod…that right!! I’m in the
middle of doing my masters! have I had time to even look at anything now I’m apparently two weeks into ’summer’ semester? That would be a B I G F A T N O!!!!
http://www.girlsinc.org/gc/
Thoughts of Treason
Wednesday, 22 December 2004
I have found myself lately over here. I’m not sure what is prompting my roving eye. I have never been a Mac person - but I’m thinking of becoming one. No virii, aesthetically swoonworthy, and none of those endless Windows errors and gradual clagging that goad me towards FDISK-ing the whole drive. I have played with Linux, but the lure of the Apple is stronger….
Jonathon Delacour makes a very persuasive case.
What to do? Am I a turncoat?
(Definition: [n] someone who rebels and becomes and outlaw )
Kiss My Butt Dylan Perry
Tuesday, 30 August 2005
OK, so I’ve been labelled a whinger. Naturally, my lovely friend who utilised the term is safely in the US, though unfortunately not in Mississippi with Katrina.
The truth is, I have malaise. I have ennui. The hysterical truth is that I am actually working at work and thus my regular time for blogging has been kicked in the guts. I can’t seem to organise myself out of my routine of the last three years. I’m sure it will happen. But at the same time I am having trouble sharing. That’s right. I don’t like sharing. Some things. M and I are sharing my laptop at present, and although he is quite happy, and I couldn’t think of a better person to share my beloved with (except maybe a total luddite who wasn’t interested in using it, ever) I still feel like I am being a hog when I use it at night, or during the day on weekends.
Which is why I am poking around at alternatives. Some involve money and some do not. Right this second there is a manky little laptop whirring away to my right as I install DSL on to its puny 2GB hard drive. If M looks at it and spits, I won’t chastise him (sorry Dennis).
My more frivolous, self indulgent option (which is where the money comes in) is to yield to my yearning for a Mac, and give M my laptop. I’m thinking of a souped up G3 Powerbook - a ‘Pismo’. From what I read online, a fair amount of people consider the Pismo to be their favourite Apple laptop. Although it came out in 2000, it was - sorry, is - very upgradable.
Another option is to just get M some old Thinkpad or Tecra from Ebay that will just run Firefox and Photoshop, which seem to be his two main requirements. We ponder here at [miaow] - we waste valuable time pondering while we should be concentrating on getting our recording rig set up. On that front, M has been my researcher, and we are a hair’s-breadth away from going with the EMU 1820 - and we are then going to build the machine around it. A lovely stable and silent machine that once functioning, will not be tweaked.
Ugly
Tuesday, 11 October 2005
OMG. I’ve just seen what this site looks like in Internet Explorer 6 - it’s completely revolting. Dis-gust-a-rama. This is what I get f0r being narrow minded and only using Firefox. Jeeez. I have some work to do when I get home. Horror! (Or, just maybe, this computer I’m on has some weirdo settings enabled and doesn’t allow CSS or has it’s own webpage styles turned on in the browser. Fingers crossed.)
Geek Out! Part 1
Tuesday, 22 November 2005
So today I picked up almost the last bits of my much researched ensemble. The computer case and the power supply. I could finally begin building my DAW. Get used to the geeky term DAW. It stands for Digital Audio Workstation. Ha! I have replaced a motherboard before, swapped hard drives, mucked about with cards and RAM, but I have never built a computer from the ground up before. Well, not without someone geekier than me holding my hand (thanks, Dyl).
Once I spread all the bits and pieces out, I was fairly convinced that I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
However. I did deep breathing and took it one step at a time. (E cooking me dinner helped too.) It couldn’t be worse than a bad bikini wax (note to self - never go back to that place in Sandringham again. ever). I tried very hard to follow all the instructions, which was a little bit hard for some of the time, as my case DIDN’T COME WITH ANY. I also had no idea what ‘thermal interface material’ was and whether I had any. After some googling, and poking about in the CPU/heatsink packet, I decided that it was already included (fingers crossed) on the basis that it would be stupid to sell it without it. [looks hopeful]
So as of 25 minutes to midnight I’ve got the motherboard in the case, the hard drives, power supply and cd drive installed and was just about to embark on connecting up all the wires, when startlingly, common sense prevailed. I will resume tomorrow with a clean brain. But in the meantime, here’s the proof that I got my hands dirty…
Geek Out! Part 1.2
Thursday, 24 November 2005
Erm. So I’m still building my DAW. Am having a few issues (fear, knowing very little, horror). I am wondering if anyone out there can help me… [looks hopeful…again]. Non geeks can tune out for this request. There’s this thing on my motherboard - the Gigabyte K8NS Ultra-939 - where you attach all the front jumper wires for the front panel i.e. the power switch, reset button, etc. So, I’ve been getting a lot of help from the AMD Socket-939 DIY Guide. I’ve attached the right jumpers to the right bits, but as my case is different from the one they use in the guide, I have two wires left that I don’t know where to plug! I have one called RESET LED (which is two wires) and another called GRD (which I’m gathering stands for ‘ground’ - and is only one wire). Neither of these are mentioned in the guide, and I have gaps in my front panel section, as I have only one POWER LED wire instead of two, and no HARD DRIVE LED wires. I’m wondering whether I put the RESET LED and the GND. Any idea?
I have to get myself a monitor still, but I’m too scared to connect the power before I know exactly where these wires go. Here is my whole rig (a little bit different from my original plan):
Gigabyte K8NS Ultra 939
AMD Athlon 64bit 3000+
EMU 1820M sound card & breakout box
Seagate 7200 8MB 160g hard drive
Seagate 7200 8MB 120g hard drive
Corsair Value Select 2×512MB RAM
Lite-On 52×52x32 CR-RW
Matrox G450
Seasonic S12 430w power supply
GMC X-21 Trinity case
P.S. Am wondering if the voltage of the Matrox 450 is compatible with the motherboard, but as I can’t find out what voltage it is, I’ll just have to wait and see
Scrambling, Sailing, Soundcarding
Thursday, 1 December 2005
Not dead. Just doing stuff. have got my new computer going! Woot! (as Kartar puts it). Turning it on for the first time was a little bit hairy. As I know next to nothing about electricity - except that you should touch something metal that is on the ground to discharge any static before sticking your hands into a computer) I kicked off my shoes, grabbed the metal pole of the standard lamp, pulled out my soundcard (the most expensive thing) and then pressed the ‘on’ switch. It just purred straight to life! I was gobsmacked. I would not have been the least surprised if the whole thing had caught alight and exploded. But it didn’t. Initally it only found one hard drive, but I switched around the hard drive ribbon and it then discovered them both (although the one that is supposed to be 160gig is only coming up as about 125gig - weirdly).
So it’s running Windows XP and last night I installed the soundcard drivers and breakout box. Yike! I really have to get the little stereo fixed so I can run my speakers…sorry…’monitors’… That’s what they’re called in studioland - ’cause you ‘monitor’ the sound through them.
Last night when I got home, M had come home early. It was a beautiful day and we were like a well oiled machine. We took Oomoo out for an after-work sail! I did most of the sailing. Yah! One of the perks of living right near the beach (though that will only be true for another few months, there are architects and builders circling close by - renovations are nigh - which is when we’ll be kicked out). Didn’t start making dinner until 9pm. And then I did the soundcard driver install…which is probably why I didn’t wake up this morning until 8.45am and scrambled into work at a quarter past nine. Having a tea break just before 10am when you’ve only been at work for less than forty minutes kind of lacks the ordinary thrill…
Freak Mouse
Monday, 12 December 2005
More on Meredith later when I go through my photos… but in the meantime, I turned up to work today (feeling a bit bedraggled) and my new mouse had arrived! I’ve been having some trouble with my shoulder, and took it to the osteopath last week. While he was torturing me working on it, Craig The Osteopath quizzed me about my computer usage and suggested that a change in mouse was due. He recommended one where your hand remains in a kind of handshake position. I relayed this information to lovely L.I at work and voila! a new mouse arriveth! The company that we got it from are pretty amazing, as they send you the mouse to try out for a week or so, and if you don’t like it you can send it back free of charge. It sort of looks like a piece of rounded cake…
Voice Recognition
Thursday, 2 March 2006
I am bleary eyed, having stayed up late the past two nights on the most fruitless task possible - networking my mother’s craptastic Win98 laptop (the DoorStop) to my lovely and excellent WinXp ThinkPad. Oh, the woe is so great. I’m using a crossover cable. All this to avoid having to install my external burner and Nero (or something) on to the DoorStop to back up my mothers email before I wipe the bloody thing. Gah. I’m going the burner route tonight, I have no more time to waste.
Yesterday was a full on day at work - my boss works in the city every now and again, and if I don’t have a file ready for him the day before to give him a hard copy, I have to email it through. So I’ve pounded out this file. He wanted it at noon, and I sent it off at twenty past. I used Dragon Naturally Speaking (when I’m not plotting how to kill it when it wilfully misunderstands me). My boss called me later that afternoon.
“You know that file you sent me today?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s just one issue with it - I’m not sure who this ‘Jackie’ is.”
“Jackie?” I begin to panic. “I don’t remember there being a Jackie.”
“Just do a ‘find’ in the word document.”
I’m already there, fumbling with the control key, searching for ‘Jackie’. I find this sentence…
He was able to gain a reflex erection, but there was no evidence of spontaneous and Jackie, making him in fertile.
“Oh my god.” I can hear my boss laughing down the phone.
“Ejaculation!!” I scream, no doubt to the joy of the people in the front office. “Ejaculation! Stupid Dragon Dictate.”
“Bye,” says my boss.
I sigh in response.
Later I find out that the person in question didn’t show for the appointment, leaving my boss with nothing to do. He is a man that really, really needs things to do, or he becomes bored and taunts his employees. Me.
Oh what a beautiful morning. Grrr.
Friday, 11 August 2006
This morning I had no impending work. No work on the shed until lunchtime. No paying work scheduled until next Wednesday. The world was my St Helen’s Shoebox Oyster. Here is a picture of my lovely teapot tea and sourdough toast with loganberry jam breakfast.
I began reading Kate Remembered - which is great, because Katherine Hepburn has always done it for me.
I decided that after my kicking back breakfast, I would finally devote some time to my DAW - after neglecting it since the power supply blew up. M was out. I set everything up in my workroom, got my screwdriver ready, and unpacked the power supply from the box. Took the sides off the computer case. Hooked up the power supply to the hard drives. Went to hook up the main power supply plug to the motherboard. And choked. And choked again. I have to say that I wept with fury. For whatever reason, when my old power supply spat it (under warranty) I took it back.
The guy at PC was apologetic and offered me a new power supply. Now, I had researched what power supply to get for my whole audio rig, because I don’t know much about it. I figured out what was best for me to get, and got it. So when this guy offered to replace my dead one (which is no longer in stock) and said ‘I use this one, it’s excellent and very quiet’ - I, in my naive girly way, said ‘Great, I’ll take that then.’
Let this be a lesson. One that I should have learnt by now. Whenever anything seems too easy when you’re getting something replaced that died while under warranty, and you’re getting it replaced with a different brand… and whenever the guy (and it’s usually a guy) that’s dealing with you says ‘I use this one, it’s excellent etc. etc.’ - STOP. THINK. Even get them to write down the model number of what they’re offering you, and go away and google it.
In my case, I built my computer, used it four times, packed it away for almost four months and the first time I used it, the power supply died. So stupidly, when the guy gave me a power supply that suited a Pentium 4 motherboard, I didn’t say;
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve got an AMD board, you’ll have to find a different one that suits my rig.”
I said (cringingly);
“Great! Thanks very much!”
And drove an hour home.
Now (having thus far stopped myself from making a hysterically screaming phone call (because some of this situation is due to my naïveté), I am going to re-research what I need and what suits my computer, and then call them back and state what I require.
Someday I’ll learn. Hopefully.
Breakdown in important posessions
Friday, 1 September 2006
So the Humber is sick and won’t change up to its highest gear. It’s going to be looked at by the Humber guru who dropped in my original engine about a bazillion (ten? yike!) years ago. Everything was going OK in the world of my important possessions for, um, about four days. I’m not sure whether installing Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 update or Google Notebook extension was responsible for the death of my laptop, but there’s nothing else I can attribute it to. Sad, deposed Thinkpad R40.
As L and I cooked white wine and drank risotto on Wednesday night, I tried to start it up. I tried many times. A couple of times I got the option to go to ‘last good config’ or ’safe mode’ - but it wouldn’t really go any further. I stayed up last night wrestling with the same problems and somehow even got through to do a system restore to take it back before the Dragon install - and it was successful, but the problem persists. I press the power button, the cdrom drive does its spinup noises, the hard drive makes a few noises, the screen stays ominously black, and all is quiet until I switch it off again (when it gets even quieter).
Stranger in a strange land
Wednesday, 13 September 2006
Just OSX me and call me baffled. I feel like the world’s biggest newbie on my Macbook. I mean, I can use the net, work in my (very annoying) Word - MSOffice Test Drive, and download Widgets. I have installed Quicksilver but have no idea how to use it, and I continue to wonder where the hell all the modded buttons have gone in the ‘Write Post’ screen of WordPress i.e. I have to type in [a href] instead of point and click. I did use my mouse today, and everything became instantly easier. I love keyboard shortcuts as much as any pseudo-geek, but I like to be able to get around while I learn them. Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, I might have snaffled myself Photoshop for Mac (legal…of course), which was going to be one of my major shortcomings, and also a proper version of MSOffice. My learning curve feels steep.
I’m used to knowing what file extensions stand for, and being fairly computer savvy, but the whole topography (?) of OSX is a foreign land to me. I haven’t really had time to discover what the structure of my ‘C’ drive looks like and where things go on it. I’m using Safari, but missing Firefox, and pondering on whether I should give up Gmail and use Mail. I have not investigated Garageband, IChat, IWeb etc. and wonder if IWeb is even useful. Is it? So basically, I’m quite baffled, but am managing to use my Macbook for work (although being hideously distracted by modifying and downloading things to make the transition easier).
This morning M and I went to OfficeWorks and bought me a fabulous chair:
which was on sale for (marginally) less than $200. That’s at least $300 less than the chair they bought me at work, and it’s just as good, if not better. I didn’t have to lie on the floor at all today and rest my back - heaven!
Do not ask me to fix stuff.
Tuesday, 19 September 2006
(At least for a week.) I got to work this morning at 10am as usual, and by 11am I was being whisked back to my workmate’s house to try and fix her new DSL connection. TWO AND A HALF hours later, after some truly bloody shocking ‘tech support’ from IPrimus they finally listened to me and are sending out a techie to check the exchange tomorrow. My workmate, who is voluble and very French, really did her nut and finally got things moving, but it was so hard to explain to her what I was doing and why I was doing it. She didn’t want to understand, she just wanted it TO WORK (and at this point I wave at my sister). ARGH!
So, goodbye to two and a half hours of work - and I was already behind as it was. I called my mum after getting back to my computer and asked if I could stay there tonight because I have to be back here in the morning. No problem. But…
“You’re probably not going to want to, but we’ve set up my email and everything on my new laptop [I start to shudder] but none of my old mail is there?”
I began to hit my head lightly and rhythmically on the desk. This is why I got out of tech support - I went insane.
“Why would your old mail be on there? It’s all been downloaded to your old laptop.”
“But I need it.”
“And I need a tolerance transplant. Sorry. Does your new lappy have a floppy drive?”
“Um…”
“It probably doesn’t. So we’d have to put your old mail on to a flash drive and transfer it to your new lappy like that.”
“I can’t understand what you’re talking about.”
Oh god.
“…and I packed up my old laptop and put it away.”
“Well, if you want me to get your old email off it, you’ll have to get it out and unpack it. Leave them both out. I’ll look at them when I get there.”
“Oh,” she added, “there’s no food, so…”
“Don’t worry, I’ll get fried rice. Yah!”
“B, I worry that you’re not eating properly.”
“Well mum, you’re the one that has no food, are you a Breatharian?”
[I didn’t actually say that last bit, but grant me some poetic license.]
And it was then that I remembered that I’d lent M my flash drive for the day. D’oh. After that brain boiling episode I went to try and print from my Macbook to the office printer. Yeah - they’re supposed to work right out of the box, aren’t they? (If you stick a whole lot more RAM in, she added snidely.) Ten minutes later I hear a shriek and multiple French curses. The printer and my Macbook did not get along, and the printer vented by going through an entire ream of paper, printing on about one third of the pages. Stab. Kill. Am beginning to miss my ThinkPad (shut up M) but am determined to persevere. Gah.
IPhoto Sucks
Friday, 29 September 2006
As a Mac newbie, used to dealing with photographs in WinXP and Photoshop, I am now grappling with IPhoto, and it is a complete piece of CRAP. I can’t even RESIZE a photo!? How does something that doesn’t allow you to resize a photo call itself ‘IPhoto’? I am not alone - googling “IPhoto sucks” finds a lot of other pissed off people. I used to use Photoshop for resizing and other tweaking, but the latest Macbooks are not exactly friends with Photoshop, so I’m just stuck - until I find some decent freeware or shareware thing (like GIMP or Seashore). People are asking me if I’m in love with my new MacBook. Not yet.
Grand Final 2006…and stuff.
Saturday, 30 September 2006
This morning I took M to the secondhand shop that Rie and I went to this time last weekend. His tail started wagging as soon as he walked through the door. We realised later that it would probably have been much more cluey NOT to go there with a pocket full of boat-shed rent. D’oh! A hundred and fifty dollars later…[groan] I had a work bench for my little back shed, M had an old Stanley plane, and we also scored a clothes basket, metal bucket, two pulleys, a brass cleat for Oomoo and two microphone stands. Yike! Oh - and I got another toolbox (as opposed to the one I got from a garage sale two weeks ago, and the plastic one from Bunnings that is stuck in the boot of the Humber which won’t open) - the best one yet.
Our second ever trailer guests (outside of family) came for Grand Final afternoon, no one but me cared about the football, so I watched the first few minutes and the last ten. Which was enough adrenaline for the day. My Mac friend Dylan jumped on my MacBook and showed me a few things, as well as laughing hysterically that I hadn’t even unpacked my little Mac remote. I tried to train him in snappy ways of searching Ebay and the excellence of Delicious. Our conversations involved much head shaking and “How can you not know that?”
Creative? Or just tight?
Monday, 9 October 2006
I kind of knew what I was getting myself into when I made the switch to a Mac. I knew that it would involve what I, in my pc swap meeting life, would term as serious money. What I didn’t realise was that once I had outlayed the ’serious money’ it pretty much meant I would then have to outlay more (the mini dvi converter cable to my lcd monitor) and more (the 2gig of RAM I haven’t been able to bring myself to buy yet - at least $300) and probably even more…on THE CASE.
My MacBook can swim laps in my trusty Kathmandu laptop case. And I use the MacBook for both my jobs. Something had to happen, but I am fairly adverse to spending even more money on this thing. One of the reasons I got the Mac is because they look cool, and thus it followed that I wanted an equally cool case. However, all the ones I like are $100 and over. What a surprise. Then I stumbled on a post over at isoglossia which I thought was quite inspiring.
As M had finally released my toolbox from it’s two month prison inside the boot of my car, I decided to have a bash. I’d already bought an old sleeping mat ($2) and some gaffer tape ($6). So here is how I made my EIGHT DOLLAR MacBook sleeve. Ha! I just followed all the directions from here. The end result is not really asthetically heart stopping…
…but it’s snug, protected, and gagging for me to make it a groovy material cover out of some funky fabric. And it was E.I.G.H.T D.O.L.L.A.R.S - take that Apple shops!
Keyboards. Typing, not music.
Friday, 8 December 2006
I finally had a minor explosion at work last week after visiting my ostepath for shoulder reparations. Although I love the little loft I work in (balcony, light filled, just-me-all-alone) - my bazillion dollar office chair is hoicked up under someone’s old Ikea-style kitchen table. It’s a killer. It is exactly the wrong height for comfort. I tried putting a brick under each leg, but then it was too tall. In a fury I grabbed a screwdriver and stabbed it through the heart… [sorry] actually, I used the screwdriver to get the arms off my chair, as I couldn’t ever get far enough under the table while sitting in it because the arms collide with the table edge. Groan.
I had been loath to make a fuss, as they did take me back after I quit. And originally they had bought me the chair and a document holder. However the document holder has gone to MonDieu (my french replacement), as did my desk and computer, which is totally fair enough. But working on a RAM starved laptop on a craptacular table looking down all the time at my papers was doing bad things - to my shoulder and my temper.
When removing my chair arms didn’t help, I stormed (though not too tempestuously) down to L and shrieked.
“I can’t do it any more! My chair doesn’t fit with the table! My shoulder is driving me MAD. I don’t have a document holder and I’m all squished up over my lappy…” and I stopped, breathing heavily.
“What do you need?” said L, the ever practial, taking care to stand where I couldn’t hurt any part of her person.
“A keyboard and a document holder - I’ll hang out for the new desk when we move in January.”
“That’s fine. Go out and get them. Bring me the reciepts. Get whatever you need.”
It was a little anti-climactic, but very soothing at the same time. And now I type these very words with a kickass apple wireless keyboard. After all this time using laptops, I forgot how nice a biggish clacky keyboard can be. And look! No wires! Haven’t got the document holder yet, but I’m going to get on to it. I’ve balanced the MacBook on the keyboard box and a few other things, and when I get my document holder my head and neck will remain straight.
A tale of two macbooks
Friday, 2 February 2007
In the end, after having a macbook for about four months, I have decided to persevere. Mostly because everything looks so much more aesthetically pleasing, and also because I feel like I haven’t even remotely taken advantage of all the cool stuff lurking under the bonnet. I want to be apple script savvy, for god’s sake.
I was still unprepared to pay over $200AU for 1GB RAM, but meanwhile I was going insane from the slowness, the incessant seconds given to the interior musing of the macbook. Yeah - I had a lot of space clagged up with movies and music, but I still had about 13GB free - which was how big my ThinkPad hard drive was [sob] in its entirety. A few years back 512MB was gutsy. Now? It is pain.
And I couldn’t just buy 1GB - noooo, for the full wonder of duo core, it’s recommended that you have the same amount of RAM in both slots i.e. ‘duo’. I was getting stuck in cyber glue if I tried to run Word, Entourage, Firefox and Excel at the same time. And forget about running Bits on Wheels with more than one other program, or it was Welcome to Slugsville. Population? Me.
It took a month or two of musing, and lots of time spent noodling around at ebay.com looking to see the minimum I could pay to buy a macbook with better specs. I also spent too much time on ebay.com.au trying to figure out how much I could probably get for my little bottom-of-the-range-but-very-cute macbook. I emailed numerous US ebay sellers about how much postage to Melbourne, Australia would cost, and was cynically unsurprised at the wild variations.
I finally found a couple of different sellers with whom I thought I could get a good deal. And I had also established that I could probably get between $1300 and $1400 for the one I already had. After wasting even more time and missing out on a few good deals I gave myself a kick up the butt and decided that the next time a particular seller had the right laptop, I was going to do the deed.
Not last week but the week before, I bought my second macbook. (I’ve decided to get into the nitty gritty of this whole experiment, mostly so I can remember it later - so I’m going to have to be impolite and mention the amounts of moola that were involved. I had paid $1300AU for my original macbook.) I’d signed up for alerts to tell me when the seller put a new secondhand laptop up on ebay. So this is what I got:
Intel Macbook
2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
4MB shared L2 cache
1GB (two 512MB SO-DIMMs)
60GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard disk drive
6x slot-loading SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
etc.
Cost: $1100US/$1440AU
Postage: $70US/$90AU
So I got it for $1540AU, including postage. And as it was being posted, someone helpfully reminded me about one VERY important angle that I had managed to completely neglect. Import duty. As my laptop was in transit I visited that site and almost coughed up my own lung in self flagellating horror - because my purchase was over $1000 I was going to be up for $325 in import duty.
I couldn’t tell M of the debacle. I was about to have to pay what it would have cost me if I had decided on the unadventurous path of merely just upgrading my RAM. I whimpered to everyone in my vicinity, including the computer guy who came into work. He said he knew someone who was after a macbook, and also thought he’d be interested in buying my dead ThinkPad for parts. “Whatever”, I said, miserably.
I got home on Thursday night and there was the package. It had taken all of about four days to arrive. I looked at M. He didn’t look like someone who had just had to fork over $325 in order to extract a secondhand laptop from the post office. I tiptoed over and read the postage label. And floated on bubble of gratitude. The seller had ticked ‘Gift’. And had thus rendered me tax free. I know that this is not legal. I also know that I don’t care. As I had been saved from having the whole exercise becoming redundant, I confided to M what might have been. Eeek.
A few days later, the computer guy asked whether I would take $1400 for my old macbook and ThinkPad. I said I had been hoping for a bit more, but was unwilling to push my luck. I do the handover on Tuesday. He gets a very good deal, and I have paid $140AU for a 2Ghz macbook (compared to a 1.8Ghz), a SuperDrive (compared to a non-DVD burning combodrive) and 2×512MB (compared to 2×256MB). My new macbook is a bit more battleworn with a lot of scratches on the outside casing, but it’s the inside zippiness that is my concern - and it’s SO much better.
The fact that my new macbook also came with the full Macromedia, Microsoft Office, WorldBook 2006 and Adobe CS2 (to name a few) didn’t hurt either. However, I will now be much more careful about the import duty angle…!!
The MSY Mystery
Friday, 3 August 2007
The computer I sorted for my dad about four or five years ago had finally begun to falter, and seeing it was fairly antiquated and computers are so cheap at the moment, I offered to build him a new one. This was going to be the second computer I’d attempted to cook up - the first is documented here. And of course, since my father was almost a child of the Depression, he has an inbuilt necessity to ‘make do’ until ‘making do’ is rendered impossible. Thus, he needed a new computer yesterday.
So I spent a few hours on the net checking out Charles Wright’s latest workhorse machine - where he builds exactly that, and includes the cost of all the parts. The forums on the Bleeding Edge site also proved useful, as did the exhaustive and excellent whirlpool.net.au. From my time doing IT kind of stuff at Momentum I’ve been using MSY to buy hardware (or ebay), because they’re cheap. Back then, they had one shop. Now they are becoming the La Porchetta’s of the computer world.
Anyway, I used used their latest advertisement to cost all the parts I was after (remembering that this is not some pimped up gaming machine, but a quick and reliable workhorse to preserve the sanity of my father). I came up with this:
Gigabyte 965P-DS3P - $149
Intel C2Duo E2160 - $112
Seagate 160g SATA - $65
2G Kit-667(2×1G) Corsair - $109
Pioneer SATA 18x 212D Black - $50
Antec NSK6500 (with 430w PS) - $139
Viewsonic VA1912W 19′ - $245
TOTAL - $869
Right. I am sure that proper hardcore geeky people could pick it all apart and provide a much better group of working parts, but it was the best I could do in the time I had. It just so happened that we had to go near the MSY shop in Malvern the next day, so I needed to get it all sorted by then. I printed out the above list. We went to MSY. I handed over the list. They handed it back. Because although they list all this stuff in their advertisement? That doesn’t mean it’s in stock. Of COURSE. I won’t even tell you what they didn’t have, and will just say that they DID have the hard drive and the DVD burner - but only in beige. And that was it.And therein lies the problem of only being a part time geek. I only knew stuff about the components I had chosen, and that was about it. Sigh. So we asked them to call their Clayton shop, but the number was constantly engaged. It was kind of on the way home, so we dropped in.
I had become more decisive during the drive, and decided that if they also didn’t have what I wanted, I would improvise, and my father would have to cope with spending a little bit more. Of course - his other option would have been to go out and drop $500 on a new prebuilt bargain box (with potentially dodgy, or at least lowest common denominator, bits in it) and a monitor and get out of the whole thing for about $750 - but I am convinced it was better to spend a bit more and know what’s been put where. Kind of like making your own cake or using a packet mix.Of course, the Clayton shop was almost as bad.
They had the case, the dvd burner (in black - yay!) and the hard drive. I had to upgrade the motherboard to a GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3R $177, they were out of Viewsonic monitors, so I went for the LG L194WT-SF $232, they had no Corsair 2gig RAM kits, so I got Kingston - same price, and the CPU was out of stock, so I had to pay more and get an E4400 for $145. Sigh. Oh. And the more computery among you may have wondered what I was trying to do - building a computer without a graphics card? Yes. Well. I did have a graphics card that I planned on using in the back of the cupboard, but of course, it was AGP (i.e. the wrong size) so I had to rectify that and, after convincing the computer shop guy that the most exciting combination of colours my dad’s computer was ever going to have to display would be contained in yet another red carpet shot of Salma Hayek and that he would not be playing graphically intense shoot-em up games, I got a cheap graphics card that will be more than adequate.
[Please forgive dodgy quality of above picture, which was taken on my phone because I need to get around to recharging the batteries in my camera.]
Oh. OK. The title. The MSY Mystery. It’s just that I began to ponder. How many people does it happen to? They go into the shops with their little lists and there (probably) equally little budget, only to find that none of their hard-researched components are actually available and, guess what? There are slightly more expensive ones instead. Naturally, I’m assuming, within my theory, that most people are putting together machines they needed yesterday, if not a week ago, and are thus able to justify an extra hundred bucks. But I have now learnt my lesson, and next time? I will telephone/fax in advance, and have the items procured and put aside for me. I think they suggest that on their webiste… D’oh.
