Long time no post? Don’t blame me, blame the schedule.
Bunch of things to cover since the last post, considering that was a while ago. Lots has happened since then, I passed my first year of college, finished my workterm with the school board, and even did some hardware upgrades too! We’ll start at the top.
First year went well, I had a blast. Work term was pretty good, I enjoyed my time at the school board, mad props to Adam, Rick, Martin, Jason, Dave, and Bruce. Lots of stuff learned there, and I got an extremely good reference from them. Mac repair is easier than most think, and they break a lot more than most people realize. Hell, they’re also fun to break, as I learned from the eMacs. Also, printers are the Devil’s spawn. Hard drive testing was a pretty alright time, and we banged out about 150 systems in just over a week. Pretty pro if you ask me. It was mind boggling how many systems we tore apart and moved around. From the moving alone, I actually gained muscle weight.
First week of my work term, I was just around the corner from the building, which of course didn’t last long. I’m now living in a 3 bedroom apartment in Bible Hill with 2 other Systems Administration students, and we’re having a good old time. Rent is great, it seems like a nice building, and we’re on the top floor, so it’s relatively quiet. So much more counter space in the kitchen too! Oh so happy. We have a server dedicated to Usenet, which was purchased not long ago, and we’re also streaming media from my desktop PC to the 360 on the new 32” LCD in the living room, and things are looking fabulous. 720P content looks fantastic, and 1080P is even more crisp. My god the place got hot in the summer though. The only thing saving me was the box fan that I kept on at max speed in the window, and even then I couldn’t game until night time when the temperature dropped considerably. Of course, this hot week only took place during the last week of summer. I spent my entire summer working in Amherst, and just recently got back to the place at the end of August. I’m still in between Amherst and Truro occasionally due to a certain interest.
Hardware upgrades have been fun! I’ve done 2 major upgrades in the past little while, the first being an MSI GTX470! It’s really a GTX465 Twin Frozr II Gold Edition, number 1761, but, since the cards they sent were just BIOS crippled GTX470s, NCIX hand flashed all of the cards with the 470 BIOS and sold them at the same price as the 465. I didn’t actually purchase mine, but a friend did. I ended up trading him a bit of cash and my GTX275 for this powerful beast of a card. Did I mention the solid copper heatsink and dual fans? Just wait till I get a new power supply and start overclocking it. Oh, and more RAM? Yes please! I can run just about all of my games at max settings, and I haven’t been happier. Borderlands is almost a constant 62FPS, Bad Company 2 averages over 60FPS, and Counter Strike Source runs at a steady 120-140FPS with 16x QCSAA. I’ll be testing other titles over the next little while too!
The second major upgrade was stepping away from my netbook and into something a bit more awesome. I’ve had my eyes on the Acer Aspire Timeline series for a while, but they never released a model with a discreet GPU. That is, never, until a couple months ago when they released the Timeline X series. I ended up walking into Staples and seeing this particular model I’m using now for 699, regularly 799. I couldn’t help myself. I needed to buy it. So, now I am in posession of an Acer Aspire Timeline X 3820TG-3022. It’s a 13.3” notebook, with a Core i5 430M, 4Gb of DDR3, an 500Gb hard drive, and, get this, switchable graphics. It can go between a Radeon HD5470 mobile and the Intel integrated graphics depending on what you need. The 512Mb HD5470 Is plenty enough to play Source based games, and even Battlefield 2 or 2142, and might even be able to show a bit of muscle when it comes to even newer titles. Keyboard seems really nice, the build quality is really good with no keyboard flex or squeaking. The case of the laptop is mainly brushed aluminum with some plastic accents, like the frame around the screen, and around the keyboard. Battery life on this little notebook is AMAZING, I looked at easily running it for 7 hours of light browsing and chatting yesterday on the Intel integrated graphics, and today, it spent 3 and a half hours on the battery in the computer lab doing some heavier multitasking (Server 2003 virtualization, heavy web browsing, heavy downloading, chatting, etc), with another hour and a half remaining on the battery right now at 22%. That’s not even taking into account the 5% reserve battery. This is basically my dream notebook. The only thing I would change about this right now is the finish. The thing is a fingerprint magnet! Also, I would have loved to get the version with the HD5670. That thing would have played some of the newer titles well. Overall though, very please with this purchase, and considering a 9 cell battery for a gift to myself for Christmas. 9 cell battery with 6 cell backup? I’m set!
If I could sum up the year so far in one word? LEGENDARY.
-Jon
Bunch of things to cover since the last post, considering that was a while ago. Lots has happened since then, I passed my first year of college, finished my workterm with the school board, and even did some hardware upgrades too! We’ll start at the top.
First year went well, I had a blast. Work term was pretty good, I enjoyed my time at the school board, mad props to Adam, Rick, Martin, Jason, Dave, and Bruce. Lots of stuff learned there, and I got an extremely good reference from them. Mac repair is easier than most think, and they break a lot more than most people realize. Hell, they’re also fun to break, as I learned from the eMacs. Also, printers are the Devil’s spawn. Hard drive testing was a pretty alright time, and we banged out about 150 systems in just over a week. Pretty pro if you ask me. It was mind boggling how many systems we tore apart and moved around. From the moving alone, I actually gained muscle weight.
First week of my work term, I was just around the corner from the building, which of course didn’t last long. I’m now living in a 3 bedroom apartment in Bible Hill with 2 other Systems Administration students, and we’re having a good old time. Rent is great, it seems like a nice building, and we’re on the top floor, so it’s relatively quiet. So much more counter space in the kitchen too! Oh so happy. We have a server dedicated to Usenet, which was purchased not long ago, and we’re also streaming media from my desktop PC to the 360 on the new 32” LCD in the living room, and things are looking fabulous. 720P content looks fantastic, and 1080P is even more crisp. My god the place got hot in the summer though. The only thing saving me was the box fan that I kept on at max speed in the window, and even then I couldn’t game until night time when the temperature dropped considerably. Of course, this hot week only took place during the last week of summer. I spent my entire summer working in Amherst, and just recently got back to the place at the end of August. I’m still in between Amherst and Truro occasionally due to a certain interest.
Hardware upgrades have been fun! I’ve done 2 major upgrades in the past little while, the first being an MSI GTX470! It’s really a GTX465 Twin Frozr II Gold Edition, number 1761, but, since the cards they sent were just BIOS crippled GTX470s, NCIX hand flashed all of the cards with the 470 BIOS and sold them at the same price as the 465. I didn’t actually purchase mine, but a friend did. I ended up trading him a bit of cash and my GTX275 for this powerful beast of a card. Did I mention the solid copper heatsink and dual fans? Just wait till I get a new power supply and start overclocking it. Oh, and more RAM? Yes please! I can run just about all of my games at max settings, and I haven’t been happier. Borderlands is almost a constant 62FPS, Bad Company 2 averages over 60FPS, and Counter Strike Source runs at a steady 120-140FPS with 16x QCSAA. I’ll be testing other titles over the next little while too!
The second major upgrade was stepping away from my netbook and into something a bit more awesome. I’ve had my eyes on the Acer Aspire Timeline series for a while, but they never released a model with a discreet GPU. That is, never, until a couple months ago when they released the Timeline X series. I ended up walking into Staples and seeing this particular model I’m using now for 699, regularly 799. I couldn’t help myself. I needed to buy it. So, now I am in posession of an Acer Aspire Timeline X 3820TG-3022. It’s a 13.3” notebook, with a Core i5 430M, 4Gb of DDR3, an 500Gb hard drive, and, get this, switchable graphics. It can go between a Radeon HD5470 mobile and the Intel integrated graphics depending on what you need. The 512Mb HD5470 Is plenty enough to play Source based games, and even Battlefield 2 or 2142, and might even be able to show a bit of muscle when it comes to even newer titles. Keyboard seems really nice, the build quality is really good with no keyboard flex or squeaking. The case of the laptop is mainly brushed aluminum with some plastic accents, like the frame around the screen, and around the keyboard. Battery life on this little notebook is AMAZING, I looked at easily running it for 7 hours of light browsing and chatting yesterday on the Intel integrated graphics, and today, it spent 3 and a half hours on the battery in the computer lab doing some heavier multitasking (Server 2003 virtualization, heavy web browsing, heavy downloading, chatting, etc), with another hour and a half remaining on the battery right now at 22%. That’s not even taking into account the 5% reserve battery. This is basically my dream notebook. The only thing I would change about this right now is the finish. The thing is a fingerprint magnet! Also, I would have loved to get the version with the HD5670. That thing would have played some of the newer titles well. Overall though, very please with this purchase, and considering a 9 cell battery for a gift to myself for Christmas. 9 cell battery with 6 cell backup? I’m set!
If I could sum up the year so far in one word? LEGENDARY.
-Jon