Away from the stressful bit of the day…

My order from Performance-PC’s arrived today (the custom PSU, plus some fan grills, a custom floppy drive and new CPU/gfx card coolers). Everything arrived in top notch condition. The PSU was a breeze to install, as was the CPU cooler. The fan grills took a bit longer than they should have, due to them being a bit bigger than normal 80mm grills. The two on the front intake fans actually overlap each other. Ah well. Didn’t fit the new gfx cooler, cos a) I couldn’t be arsed and b) I think it might be better to mount it on the Northbridge chip anyway. Will need to get some thermal epoxy for that.

The PSU is fantastic. The braiding on the cables is top quality. Everything now looks a bit neater. Some cabling still needs tidying up, but that’s mainly minor stuff. As wierd as it may sound, all the LEDs in the case seem a bit brighter since installing the new PSU… could be just my imagination though!

The CPU cooler (a Coolermaster X-Dream) is also great. Spinning the fan at full power makes it a better cooler than my Thermalright SLK-800 (the king of heatsinks) and 80mm fan combo. Looks a lot better as well, even with the stock fan grill (which I’ve swapped for one of my new ones). Unfortunately, it’s loud.

The floppy drive has a black, anodised aluminium face plate, so it matches the finish of my case. Other than that, it’s a standard floppy – nothing exciting. It’s only there for the times when I need to flash the BIOS, personally, I’d consign all FDD’s to the scrapheap, if it wasn’t for their amazing ability to get you out’ve trouble when your machine fails… I do need to get a 3mm bl00 LED for it though. I will not tolerate non-bl00ness in my case!

All this new stuff means that there are only a few bits and bobs I need to do, before my PC is finished.

  • match the CD drive to my case
  • sort the lighting
  • tidy the wires at the bottom of my case (the front panel connector stuff and the LCD wire)
  • Replace the top mounted “blow-hole” fan, to match the other case fans

and that’s pretty much it! All the hard work will be done and I’ll have one sexhay PC

Got a Net MD? Sick and tired of OpenMG Jukebox? I know I am – it sucks… half my tracks don’t convert properly, so are just however many minutes of silence. Plus, it doesn’t properly support any form of MP3 and has that annoying “Check-In/Out” feature.

Anyway, I was searching around for an alternative method to OpenMG and stumbled across this little gem. You’ll need Nero Burning Rom + the Imagedrive function and Sony Simple Burner (should come with your Net MD). To enjoy a simple method of transferring MP3s or other music files onto your Net MD, follow these steps…

  1. Open Nero, select Audio CD from the presets and drag all the MP3’s you want into it. Nero is far less picky about formats and sample rates. I found this method foolproof.
  2. Save or ‘Burn’ your CD to your hard drive (not your burner). Nero will give you a default filename of ‘image.nrg’
  3. Use Nero’s Imagedrive (bundled with Nero) to mount the .nrg (CD-image) you just created. Lets say Drive ‘F’ for this example.
  4. Select your ‘virtual F’ CD drive in Simple Burner and burn it to Minidisc. When you are done, trash the large .nrg file sitting on your desktop.

Advantages of this Method:

  • You are using reliable software.
  • Check-in/check-out is avoided.
  • Unlike OpenMG, files aren’t left all over your hard drive.
  • You can delete and re-arrange the downloaded tracks on your MD without having to resort to connecting it back to your PC.
  • It is faster and doesn’t thrash your hard drive.

There you go… you should now be on the way to Net MD bliss…

My GeForce 4 Ti 4800 also arrived today. Unreal Tournament never looked so good! 1280*1024, with all detail levels set to highest… and it never once dropped below 38fps during an intense 12 bot deathmatch.

On the down-side, adding it to my case has pushed the average ambient temperature up 3-5 degrees, to about 35 degrees celcius…

Heard the new Metallica single, “St Anger”, last night. Loads of people had told me that it was crap, prior to me hearing, but I actually quite like it. It’s different, for Metallica.

The riff reminds me of “Blind” by Korn, which is probably where some are drawing the nu-metal comparison from. Plus the fact that there’s no solo…

It’s not as good as their “old stuff”, but it was never going to be. I think people’s expectations were that when they (Metallica) said they were going back to their roots, they were going to write Master of Pupperts part 2 or something… Sorry, it was never going to happen.

I learned a while back not to have any preconceived expectations about what Metallica will do next… Over their 20 year career, they have strived to always stay on top, to always change it up and stay fresh. Yet people always seem to expect – almost demand – a generic thrash album from them. Why? Do you want a band that “plays it safe”, musically? Do you want to listen to the same things regurgitated over several albums? Or do you want some variety in a bands discography? Don’t you want some contrast? Something that says “this band aren’t afraid to take risks”?

Personally, whatever the new album/its musical direction sounds like, I’d rather have that over a cash-in on former glories in a rehash of Kill ‘Em All or something similar…

Sticking with the music theme, I’ll turn my attention to Evanesence. I dunno what to make of this band. When I first heard their single “Bring Me to Life”, I wasn’t too sure about it. “Sure, the girl’s got a good voice and it’s quite catchy”, I thought to myself, “but the double-vocals with the guy sound a little too much like bog-standard nu-metal pap…”

Thankfully, it turns out that the guy that sings on that single, is only a guest vocalist (he’s from a band called “12 Stone” or something like that). I’ll also admit that the single’s been growing on me quite a lot since I first heard it. As a result, I checked out a couple of other songs (“Lies” and “My Immortal” ) and I was quite impressed. Neither song sounded anything like the others and showed some promise.

There’s still something about them that makes me a little unsure though… I may buy the album anyway, just to ease my curiosity, if nothing else. If it’s good then that’s a bonus, I guess. I can always take it back if it sucks…