My father recently purchased a new eMachines T5082 without asking my opinion and as such I have been tasked with configuring it. The first question, of course, is why is Windows Vista so awful slow the system is unusable? Let us list the reasons.

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I finally bought a Scythe Kama Bay. It’s a product of solid construction. The 12cm fan it ships with is reasonably quiet, for me, even at +12V. It won’t spin up at all at +5V, but probably will at some higher voltages. It has a dust filter in behind the swiss cheese metal mesh in front. It probably provides better airflow with that removed. (Which I later did.)

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My Biostar Socket 754 NForce3 mainboard arrived today. For $50 as of this writing it’s about the cheapest Socket 754 mainboard you can obtain. It doesn’t sport any bells or whistles, just the entry level functionality you’d expect from an inexpensive mainboard.

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My vanilla green PCB eVGA GeForce 6600GT AGP is a nice break from the previous two XFX 6600GT cards I had in my possession which both failed to function on numerous test systems. In stark contract to the XFX offering, the eVGA card worked immediately upon installation in my ECS K7S5A mainboard from several years ago. This board has been with me since 2003 and served me well, with the exception of a conflict with an Adaptec U2W SCSI card which didn’t get along with my K7S5A.

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I have heard almost nothing but good things about Philips’ DVP642. I finally ordered one in July from Amazon as they had the cheapest price at the time. It was on backorder for a month, during which time the price rose around $10. Nevertheless, I still snagged the player at a good price.

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I was in the market for a portable MP3 player recently. The cheapest iPod or Rio Karma I could find was hundreds more than I wanted to spend, even refurbished. Fortunately, someone suggested I look at CD based portable players. It had not occurred to me, as I own no CDs of my own, but it turned out to be an excellent suggestion.

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I recently picked up the DI-524 from Fry’s Outpost.com for about $40 after a $20 mail-in rebate. Considering 11b equipment with similar functionality is going for basement prices of $20, on the surface it seems to be a reasonable deal. I was only interested in the 11g functionality, and do not intend to use the router functionality at all. (It’s a shame no one is interested in APs. I would have bought a regular AP had they been available this cheap.)

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I took some time to play with my Omni View SE today. While it is a little old, it’s still a solid device. It has multiple inputs on the rear, including all the inputs for the console, unlike cheaper KVMs that have some or all of the console inputs on the front. With a special cable, you can chain multiple Omni Views together. This unit requires male to female VGA cables and supports serial mice, for those that may still need that functionality. (Anyone?)

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I picked up a Linxcel four port electronic KVM switch from Ebay last week. It arrived today along with four sets of combined cables, DIN 6 male to male.

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I obtained an AMI MegaRAID card today. It’s quite slick. Since it’s so hard to find specifications about the card online, I thought I’d publish the information I have found. My particular card is an AMI MegaRAID Express 200, series 466. Dell sold these cards with their PowerEdge 2400 series servers back in 2001 as the PERC2. Both Adaptec and AMI cards were labeled as PERC2 cards. The card I have is an OEM version of the MegaRAID 466.

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A few weeks ago I purchased ECS’ L7S7A2 mainboard. I have had some time to share some experiences with it and now its time to review the time I spent with it.

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Dell gets a huge thumbs down for shipping proprietary ATX PSUs with the _standard_ ATX connector, but different wiring.

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I was excited to receive my AOpen H700A last night. It was a huge, heavy, roomy case. The photos online do not quite do it justice. This huge monster has enough room for any modest server.

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