Robert Leverington

I’ve had my current machine since Summer 2004, it replaced an old Pentium 2 Gateway I had been using (that was originally purchased in 1998). This Christmas I decided it was time to start saving up for a new rig, I wanted it to be a good machine that would last me at least another four years, so I needed £500; it was to be assembled from components. This took me about six months to save up for, and at the weekend I bought all the parts from eBuyer. About two hours was spent build, however I have not yet been able to install an operating system on it as Windows XP Service Pack 1 does not support PCI-Express devices; I couldn’t get the Service Pack 2 slip-streaming technique to work, so will have to save up to buy a new copy which may take a few weeks (I’d better hurry though as Windows XP won’t be readily available after June 30th).

Processor

My dream was to have four cores (for heavy multi-tasking), I’d not heard much about AMD’s multi-core ventures for a while, and Intel were definitely far ahead. In their Core 2 Quad range there were several good choices, but all but one was out of my price bracket. The Q6600 with a clock speed of 2.40 GHz was my choice, it cost £133.95. While I could have got a much higher clock speed with a dual-core - the benefits of being able to run multiple applications at a higher performance definitely outweighed the individual core power reduction.

Motherboard

I chose the Foxconn P35A-S at £72.66. While I am told this is a fairly low price, it certainly doesn’t show. It works a charm, has enough ports for all of my needs and came with a variety of extremely useful cables (although, I suppose these come as standard nowadays). It was easy to install, although an issue did arise with the connector panel fascia which had to be hit in the right places to fit in.

Memory

Expensive RAM was never an option, I was already nearing my budget and at the moment memory is so cheap that it can easily be replaced (or, given a sufficient amount installed, simply removed). I chose to buy 4GB of Kingston extraValue RAM (available in packs of 2×1GB), it appears to function perfectly well - but time will tell whether the right decision was made. In total I spent £57.98 on memory.

Hard disk

Surprisingly the Seagate Barracuda hard disks have fallen greatly in price, a 250GB one can now be picked for just £32.99. I don’t really have a great deal of personal data (only 20GB), most space on my current system is occupied by software and games, so a high capacity wasn’t really necessary - this suited just fine. If I ever do start needing more disk space (I might consider downloading movies from the likes of Apple if there schemes ever get to England) I plan on setting up a dedicated file server, this would be best for performance and reliability - one is always worried about the ever-present possibility of a hard disk failing. A file server set up in a RAID configuration would avoid this.

Graphics card

While it would be nice for a graphics upgrade (my current computer is using a GeForce FX 5200) this wasn’t essential so I tried to minimize the cost of the graphics card. Looking around I stumbled upon the Inno3D 8600GT. It was perfect for what I needed and had 1GB of video memory, an AGP connector, and a maximum resolution of 2560×1600 (not that I could possible use that, since I’m limited by my computer monitor native resolution). I got this for £53.98 - a fair price.

Case

The final piece of hardware I’d like to discuss in detail is the case, it may seam insignificant compared to the rest of the hardware, but building a computer in a cheap extra value case is a nightmare - you are almost bound to end up with scrapes where the metal wasn’t rounded off. I chose the Antec P182, it looks brilliant both on the inside and out. The cooling system is extremely well thought out (you can feel how cool it is just by having it switched on beside you) and even features sockets for water-cooling (although I will not be needing this). The hard-drive bays were easy to use and the mechanism for fitting disk drives works a charm. The only snag that I encountered was that some of the cables didn’t reach and had to be manually extended due to the unusual position of the PSU. All in all it was a great case and I would certainly recommend it.

Miscellaneous hardware

Other, less-notable, hardware included:

• Extra Value All in One Internal Card Reader
• Optiarc DVD+/-RW drive.
• Akasa AK-956SF Heatsink with Fan
• Sumvision 600W PSU

A few months ago I registered this domain with a view to setting up a small website to document a few of my on-off projects, maybe generating a bit of publicity for them, while at the same time providing informative articles that might help someone. The tricky part was choosing a content management system.

Generally there are two paths that can be taken when creating a website, develop your own templating script, or use a package such as Drupal or Wordpress (now in use here). I like to think that I’m fairly good at PHP, so jumped straight in at the deep end and began hacking together my own basic website templating engine; nothing too advanced was needed - just a way to keep pages in a hierarchy. As you can probably tell, this quickly fell to pieces; my interest in programming it started dipping and I was left with yet another half finished project - I just wanted to start writing some content.

A while ago I made a website for an open source project using Drupal as the primary application, this worked fairly well; the community was fairly large which meant that anything less powerful would have quickly been overrun and the administration overhead was fairly low. I had gained a fair bit of knowledge regarding how it could be administered and effectively used, so installed it to try it out as a personal site. The vast amount of configuration required was quite daunting, and much more than one needed for a small personal site (even if the hierarchical page organisation scheme is one of the best available). It was quickly scrapped and I moved back to developing a new custom templating engine.

Again, this soon stalled, so I looked into alternative content management systems; Wordpress is a fantastic engine, but the theme editor lets it down (I wasn’t too fond of the administration interface that I remember it having, either). The last time I’d used it was about a year ago, so I thought that it might be worth a trial (Sean Whitton managed to convinced me that “it’s fantastic.”) - and at this point I was getting desperate; my complex hierarchy system design had evaporated and a blog would suffice for what I now wanted. After installing it, I was amazed at how sleek it now was, far from the clunky interface it had previously; it’s a pleasure to use and I’m grateful I chose to reevaluate it.

This blog is still a work-in-progress, although I aim to update it fairly regularaly with small articles on specific topics and my current projects, so hopefully it won’t fall in to demise. The next major thing to do is have a go at making a theme, hopefully this will be easier than one would expect.