Backside Bus

While I am generally a Windows user, I have always been interested in Linux. I made an attempt to install Red Hat on my PC in the late 90s (but had too many driver issues and couldn't get x-windows to work properly so I decided to wait a while). In early 2010 I looked into it again and discovered Ubuntu . After playing with 10.04 and subsequent versions in VirtualBox for a while, I restored an old laptop using 11.04. After that, I was hooked, and I have had some version of Ubuntu running on a PC ever since. Once I was sure everything was stable on my new machine (I really have to give it a name...), I grabbed the latest version (12.10) and set up a dual-boot machine. It actually wasn't that quick. I definitely wanted to run Ubuntu on the system, but I also didn't necessarily want to extend the boot time - I was too used to the  the 20-seconds to working in a desktop program from totally off   performance I was getting, and I didn't want to slow it down, even if it...

In the short time since I finished building my custom PC , I have done a couple of upgrades to the components and played around with overclocking in order to improve overall system performance. In this post, I will cover the new components I have added, and I will have a separate post on overclocking in the near future. New Components Since the build, I have added an aftermarket cooling system to improve cooling when overclocking (see Overclocking Without Permission for details on why it was necessary), added a blu-ray RW drive, and increased cooling capacity even more by putting another fan in the case. The end result is that I can now play and backup blu-ray movies, and I can burn my HD home movies in actual High Definition without worrying that my computer will overheat when encoding the videos (that wasn't an issue when the system was running at stock speeds). Blu-Ray Drive   The Blu-Ray drive I added is an LG WH14NS40 , a SATA 14x Blu-Ray burner that supports BDXL,...

Meet my new PC Well, this is progressing much faster than I thought. I am actually typing this on the box that the series is about. The combination of Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales, and Christmas presents made it possible to get most of the parts, and a great sale on the processor at Microcenter (more than $100 off list, and at least $60 less than the best sale I found online) sealed the deal. Final specs As my uncle pointed out  in the comments of the last post, I didn't really talk about the Power Supply or the case. In order to support future expansions, I decided to go with a 600 watt power supply. As I add graphics cards and other components, this will ensure that I have ample power available. I also selected a mid-tower case. This has plenty of space for HDDs, SSDs, optical drives, and, most importantly, cooling fans.  Parts List If you read my last installment , you're aware of the general specs of the machine. Here is the list of specific parts I us...

This is a bummer ... I had been hoping to get one of these, but when they didn't come out for over a month and there was no word on how long they were delayed, I decided to get my Sony Ultrabook instead.

I've been using Windows 8 for a little over one month now, and have used it enough to develop some thoughts on it as an Operating System (OS) as well as on what I perceive as the broader direction Microsoft is trying to go with it. In a nutshell, Windows 8 an attempt at combining the traditional desktop OS with a tablet/touch-friendly OS. For desktops and laptops, this basically means that you get a fully-functional desktop OS (with some not-so-small performance enhancements over Windows 7) overlayed with an elegantly executed tablet OS. In some cases, this works very well, and in others it can be confusing or just weird. Personally I think that MS is headed the right way, and that as the lines between traditional computers and tablets continue to blur, we'll see more of this (such as Ubuntu for Android - a different approach to the same idea). Where's my Start Menu? The biggest change in Windows 8 is the addition of the start scr...

My brother-in-law recently gave me a motherboard. He had been thinking about building a PC, but life got ahead of him and he decided he wasn't going to do it just yet. Since he was also moving to Australia, he decided it was something he didn't want to take with him. It took me a while to decide what I was going to do with it. I've never built a complete PC all at once. I've replaced every part in more than one system, but that usually would take place over a couple of years. It's not that I didn't want to build a computer, but it was generally less expensive to buy something pre-made and then tweak it. But now I had this shiny new motherboard, and a pretty decent one at that. So I decided to take the plunge. This seems like a great topic for a series of posts... walking through the process of obtaining the parts and software, putting it together, then testing and running benchmarks to see if it will perform as well as I hope. I'll start with a post...