Dec 12
27
This is a delay (and minor) update, but back in October, Clementine’s case fan started making noise. Â It was over five years old, so I got my money’s worth out of it, with no hard feelings. Â 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. Â I have been happy with it all these five years — it’s nearly silent and moves a decent amount of air. Â If I get another five years out of the replacement, I’ll still be happy!
Jul 12
31
I love the keyboard and mouse combo that I have for Clementine — a Logitech LX710 wireless keyboard and matching LX7 wireless mouse. I love that combo so much, in fact, that the set I have for Clementine is actually the second I’ve owned — the first was for my old (retired) desktop, Fozzie. However, after 5 years of use, the mouse on Clementine started to have an odd duplicate-click issue — if you clicked the mouse, sometimes it register as two (or more!) clicks. A Google search turned up lots of other people with this issue on mice after they’ve hit a certain age, but no solutions. I’m happy with the five years I got out of that mouse, so I don’t hold a grudge. Rather, I took the exact spare set that I have still hanging around from Fozzie, and swapped that in place. This set is actually older (going on six years old now!), so hopefully it doesn’t start to show its age as well anytime soon!
Feb 12
7
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.
Jul 11
15
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.
Apr 11
30
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!
Feb 11
25
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 this will be a beneficial upgrade on several fronts. The fact that it’s wireless means it’s no longer dependent on anyone computer. Sure, Windows can share printers, but then you have to make sure the host computer is powered on. In my computing environment, where I have 3 computers spread over 2 floors, there’s no guarantee that Clementine will be powered on and it might be inconvenient to go and turn it on. In this vein, the new printer can actually automatically open up the paper output tray when a print job comes in. So, as long as the printer is on (in a standby mode), any other computer can print. Great!
Also, over time it has become more and more desirable to be able to occasionally do a quick copy, without having to start up a photo editing program, scan, save, and print. This new multifunction unit will streamline that workflow quite a bit.
So far, I really like this printer / scanner. It was very easy to set up, and the features all seem to work really well and are easy to use. I already love Canon printers, and the scan quality is quite good as well. I’ve always been weary of multifunction devices, but I did a lot of research and this particular one seems to be great.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that the old printer and scanner were two of the oldest components in Clementine. The Canon printer was 5 years old, but the Epson scanner is an amazing 10 years old — it’s seen many computers come and go and has continued to perform well in all that time. You will be missed, Epson!
Dec 10
30
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!
Nov 10
17
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 into home theater PCs, and it’s a great addition to my home theater. I wasn’t sure if I really would use a PC like this, but it gets used all the time. Netflix streaming, Youtube watching, Pandora or iTunes music to my wireless speakers throughout the house, or just sticking an SD card in to view digital pictures. It’s amazing how often it comes in handy to have a decent computer permanently set up in the family room, attached to the TV and the home’s sound system. And I still love the appearance of the Dell Zino HD — it blends in great with the other A/V equiment.
If you’re on the fence about getting a home theater PC in general or a Zino HD in particular — they both have high recommendations from me.
Aug 10
6
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 most RAM of all of my computers. But that’s not too bad of an idea — laptops benefit greatly from RAM because they typically have slower hard drives, and more RAM means hitting the hard drive less. Still very happy with Beaker, and may go ahead and replace the other 1GB module at some point.
Mar 10
17
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) To be a computer that is permanently attached to my TV so that it’s more convenient to watch Netflix streaming moves and other video content on my TV, rather than manually hooking up a laptop on-demand, and 2) To also be attached to my wireless speakers that I have sprinkled throughout the house and provide a music-control interface on the first floor, rather than running upstairs to the office whenever I want to change playlists. Although these are my current primary use cases, I really wanted a computer that, as much as possible, would not restrict me down the road, as I have no idea what services I will want to use in the future. So I wanted it to support these use cases well, but not be too specialized.
Due to being permanently attached to the TV and thus becoming part of my home theater, aesthetics were important to me. I didn’t want to just set up a regular desktop next to my TV. And input matters too — my couch is about 10 feet back from the TV, so wireless is a must, and I don’t want to just have a full keyboard and mouse sitting on my coffee table. Aesthetics were important to this project.
My original plan was to built an HTPC myself. I looked into Micro-ATX motherboards, and was able to piece together a decent system at a reasonable price. The sticking point, though, was case design. I really wanted something compact and discrete, but micro-ATX cases are still, on the whole, much larger than what I had in mind. The best ones were roughly the width of a cable set top box (foot and half, perhaps), but were suprisingly tall — on the order of 7 inches. That’s quite an imposing box, and none that I saw really looked attractive in terms of home theater equipment.
So I scrapped that idea and began to consider pre-built systems. There is a new desktop form factor recently called “Nettop”, which is inspired by Netbooks — very small cases with reasonable, but lower-powered hardware. For the most part, nettops are designed for exactly my scenario of a home theater PC.
The problem was, when I started looking into nettops from manufacturers like Asus and Acer, they were either too low powered (I want to make sure the machine can grow somewhat with my needs) or, again, too ugly.
Until I discovered the Dell Zino HD. This computer is exactly what I was looking for — small and compact (8 inches by 8 inches, about 3 inches tall), attractive (you can pick colors, but mine is glossy black with a minimal number of ports on the front), and reasonably powerful (mine has a 1.5GHz dual-core AMD CPU, and runs Windows 7 just fine).
On the input side, I looked at tons of small keyboards and remotes, and decided on the Logitech diNovo Mini, which is a really compact wireless keyboard/touchpad combination. It’s about the size of a Blackberry, and is great if you’re OK with thumb-typing. you certainly wouldn’t want to type a thesis on this keyboard, but it’s perfectly fine for typing in URLs, movie names into Netflix, and that sort of thing. And the touchpad works well too. This way, I have full control over the computer, but in a nice little input device that doesn’t look out of place in the family room.
On the software side, I was open to the idea of all-in-one media center packages, like Windows Media Center, that provide a 10-foot interface and provide easy access to all your media, but I couldn’t find one that really did a good job of integrating with both Netflix and iTunes. So for now, I am just running iTunes and accessing Netflix through a web browser. Since I have my full input device and this is a decently-spec’ed computer, this works just fine, although I am still passively on the lookout for a great media center software package.
In the end, I love this setup, and have no real criticisms for either the Zino HD nor the diNovo Mini. For my purposes (wanting a relatively general-purpose computer), I think they are a great combination and are easy to use. For people who had already bought into a particular media center software package, there may be other better options of lower-powered computers and specialized remotes. But even in that case, I would argue that, based on what I’ve seen, no nettop computer looks as good in a home theater as the Zino HD.