Leedberg.com|Greg's computers

Two recent upgrades to mention:

First, back in December, I replaced Clementine’s 802.11g WiFi adapter with a new TP-LINK 802.11n adapter.  This is the first step in a multi-step plan I have to upgrade my home network to all-802.11n.  Since Clementine’s adapter has been upgraded prior to the router, she doesn’t yet see the full speed that the new adapter is capable of.  But, even with just this upgrade, I have found that speeds between Clementine and my other computers have almost doubled.  The old adapter was, well — old.  One of the oldest components I had still in use, in fact.  That adapter started out as an adapter for Waldorf, my machine built out of spare parts in 2005.  The next step in my 802.11n plan will be to upgrade my router, at which point I’ll see the full effect of the new adapter.

Also, one of Clementine’s hard drives got upgraded.  Clementine has two hard drives, one for OS/applications, and one for data.  The 500GB data drive seemed huge 3 years ago when I got it, but having a child and taking endless amounts of HD home videos has resulted in that drive filling up much quicker than expected.  So, it has been replaced with a Western Digital WD Black 2TB drive.  Hopefully, this will last me at least another 3 years before it fills up as well!

This is a delay (and minor) update, but back in October, Clementine’s case fan started making noise.  It was over five years old, so I got my money’s worth out of it, with no hard feelings.  I did my research to find a replacement fan, and came to the conclusion that the same fan, an Enermax 80mm with magnetic bearings, was still the best option.  I have been happy with it all these five years — it’s nearly silent and moves a decent amount of air.  If I get another five years out of the replacement, I’ll still be happy!

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 at the same time.  The upgrade wasn’t without its hiccups (the stock CPU cooler was defective!), but in the end Clementine is now running great with a new Intel Core i7 CPU.  For pictures and commentary of the rebuild, check out this page.

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 it’s not super powerful, since I don’t game, so it was very reasonably priced.

But, all of a sudden one day, it started acting up.  While using Clementine, you would randomly get multi-colored pixelization, and after a while of the pixelization, the machine would hang.  From the beginning I suspected this was the video card failing, but I did try other easy things first — update driver, update Windows, reduce resolution, turn off Aero… the last two helped prolong the time before Clementine would hang, but nothing actually fixed the problem.

So I ordered a more modern, but very similar card to replace the failing one — an EVGA GeForce 210.  Still nVidia, still silent, and still modestly powerful but well-priced.  Since it’s four years later, it’s significantly more powerful than the 7100GS it replaces.  It also adds an HDMI port in place of the S-Video port my previous card had.  Great card so far.  And it’s a PCI Express 2.0 card, so my current motherboard is holding it back, but I’m planning to replace the motherboard next year, so this card will grow with that upgrade as well.

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 of the cards and onto my computer.  Back in August, I bought a simple external USB card reader (the kind that looks like a flash drive, but a card plugs into).  But then I lost it!  And as I was considering replacing it, I decided that that’s the sort of thing that’s likely to get lost again.  So I decided to get an internal one that becomes part of the front panel.  It’s a Koutech model which fits in a 3.5-inch drive bay, so it’s not terribly obtrusive, and it supports just about every card format on the market — it even has a dedicated MicroSD slot, so no need for adapters!  And it also adds an additional USB port to the front panel.  I already have the two that are part of the case, but this puts one higher up — so I’ll probably actually use this one more.  A good unit as far as I can tell!

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 a Blu-ray burner so that the videos could be stored in their full-HD glory.  So far, so good.  Blu-ray burners are still somewhat in their infancy, but this drive (an LG 10x model) had consistently good reviews and was at a good price point.  I’ve only had it a few days, so I haven’t tested it exhaustively, but I did burn one Blu-ray video disc using Pinnacle Studio and it turned out successfully, so I’m optimistic about it.

This drive replaces a basic Compaq OEM DVD-ROM drive.  I decided to replace this drive because it was one of the oldest components in Clementine, and that drive was long and sometimes hard to work with inside the case.  Since I chose to replace the DVD-ROM, that means I still have my Plextor DVD burner as well, so now Clementine has two optical disc burners.  I figure that’s OK — the Plextor drive is newer and better than the older Compaq drive, so even if it only gets used for reading now, I’d rather hold on to that drive.  And who knows — maybe I’ll want to burn two DVDs at once someday!