Clementine, the primary desktop for me and my wife, recently underwent a major upgrade.  The idea was to upgrade just the CPU, and anything necessitate by upgrading the CPU.  Which ended up meaning the CPU, CPU cooler, motherboard, and memory.  And since I was doing all this anyway, I decided to upgrade to Windows 7 [...]

Clementine was lucky enough to get yet another unplanned upgrade recently, this time a new video card.  Why?  Because her previous one failed (specifically, it blew a capacitor).  I’m a big fan of the card that was previously in Clementine — an EVGA GeForce 7100GS.  It’s an Nvidia chipset; it’s a silent, fanless card; and [...]

Clementine got an unplanned upgrade — a front panel card reader!  I’ve never gone out of my way to include card readers in my machines, but over the last couple years I’ve really started using flash cards for cameras, phones, and other devices, so it made sense to make it easier to get files off [...]

Clementine‘s Canon printer and Epson scanner have both been replaced with a wireless Canon MG6120 Photo All-In-One printer.  Since this is a wireless printer/scanner/copier (through Wifi), it’s no longer considered a part of Clementine and is now instead considered a shared resource. Both the previous printer and scanner were great and largely working fine, but [...]

My holiday upgrade this year was adding a Blu-ray burner to Clementine.  I’ve always been interested in the large storage capacities of Blu-ray discs (25GB on a single layer), so had long planned on getting a burner in 2011.  However, recently I bought an HD camcorder, so I decided to speed up the acquisition of [...]

Scooter, my home theater PC, recently got upgraded from 2GB RAM to 3GB.  Scooter came from Dell with two 1GB modules, so I replaced one with a 2GB module to achieve the 3GB total. This is also a reasonable time to give an update — Scooter is working out great!  This was my first foray [...]

I bought my laptop, Beaker, in 2008, and haven’t done upgrades to him at all in that time.  So, finally, I increased the amount of memory.  Beaker came with two 1GB modules, so I replaced one of them with a 2GB Crucial module, bringing the total to 3GB.  Interestingly, this means that Beaker has the [...]

I recently added a new computer my family — a home theater PC named Scooter. I’ve been planning on getting a home theater PC for over a year now, but it was a long process of finding just the right device that met my needs. I had two main use cases for this PC: 1) [...]

As I mentioned in my last post, Clementine recently evolved from being a computer just for my wife, into being a computer for both of us. As a result, she needed a boost in a few areas to better suit the needs of both of us combined. Also, with all the stuff going on over [...]

Life has been busy recently, and as such, I’ve been lax in updating this site. But here’s a recap of the last couple months: My wife and I bought a house (hence life busy)! Which has resulted in several computer changes. Most importantly, we decided that instead of each having a separate computer, we’d consolidate [...]