Behold the Phenom II 1055T

Turbo 3D it's like V-TEC for your PC

Waaah fitting time!

As a side note at this point I had noticed some of the pins on the chip were bent, nothing a mechanical pencil couldn’t fix. Rena though was very worried D:

Locked and loaded.

The locking system for the AMD heat-sinks are infinitely easier to use than the push pins on my old socket  775.

Cleaning out my closet

Since I was replacing my mobo, I decided to gut the old girl to redo all her cabling and clean out the dust that had built up over the past few months. The above was one of the cleaner cages.

Yaaay just about done!

Oh Noes! Rena managed to climb up onto my video card and can't get down D:

She slipped off the card and got tangled up in the jungle of cables... Wait why are those cables moving?

Waiiii~ Rena inside one of a wind tunnel.

All photos by yours’ truely using my trusty Tamron 90mm coupled with a K-7 body.
Oh yes! As a bonus to celebrate the revival of my PC I’ve finally managed to post my first ever astro stack.

As per usual the bigger version can be found on my deviantArt site here.

Enjoy!

Features
The X100e is surprisingly well featured for a small ultraportable. It provides three USB ports (one powered), VGA output, a 4-in-1 card reader, and a decent set of built-in speakers.Connectivity is provided by 3G capability, standard WiFi support (b/g/n), Bluetooth and a LAN port.
Display is catered for by a 11.6″ backlit HD LCD screen. The screen is surprisingly bright for those who are used to more dim displays. The screen showed very saturated colours which can cause eye strain, dimming it down does wonders for long term usage.Construction
The laptop is made from tough reinforced plastic which gives it a light but solid feel. Even with the 6 cell battery the laptop only weights in at a modest 1.5kg, which is lighter than most textbooks and infinitely lighter than regular laptops.Usability & Ergonomics
The full sized keyboard makes typing a breeze, although the keyboard can be a bit more resistant that most other keyboards. For that matter, one must tap the keys a bit harder than most other laptops or keyboards.
The touchpad lives in small recess directly below the keyboard. Its clicking buttons sit flush with the bottom edge of the laptop. It was only satisfactory as it did miss some strokes such, as the scrolling action for webpages.
The Trackpoint system makes for easy scrolling thanks to a dedicated button that you hold down and move the pointer forwards and backwards to scroll. It’s not as fast as the touchpad but for scrolling it’s useful.

Performance
Lenovo offers a choice of two pre-built models: the ‘entry’ and ‘enhanced’ version. The model being reviewed is the latter model with the optional processor upgrade to a Turion Neo X2 L625, which offers an extra 512KB of L2 cache.The processor is no Ferrari but it does get the job done. Most applications run smoothly, it handles light photo editing very well, runs older games, and can multitask without slowing down to a crawl. For an entry level unit, this isn’t bad at all. However when the power states start being decreased below medium, applications start becoming sluggish. Even typing in Word or browsing Firefox becomes a bit slow.

Battery LifeThe six cell affords roughly five hours by Lenovo’s estimates. Although I haven’t run lab tests, I can confirm it is possible to squeeze five hours out of the battery. Don’t expect to be playing games and watching movies for five hours. The best it will do depending on how hard you flog the system, is 2 to 3 hours. I managed the five hours with word processing, some music and web browsing.

Verdict
The X100e is a great entry level ultraportable for reps on the go or those people that like to spend hours at a cafe. It packs decent performance, good battery life, is comfortable to use, great looks, but it is pricey and is only for those that can afford it. At the time of the sale the difference between the ‘enhanced’ X100e and the higher end X200s was only a few hundred dollars, so my recommendation is if you can afford the extra money, go with the X200s. However if you simply can’t afford it, its entry level cousin will serve you well.

Photos by yours truely

Below is what my work space looks like now.

So I finally bothered to put my far left monitor to its horizontal position to give Left 4 Dead 2 a spin in triple screen mode.
I used the same settings I used in my previous experiment with the original Left 4 Dead.
I’ve noticed that the game does not keep the screen size settings when you close it so you must set the resolution and screen mode to “Fullscreen” each time.

This is either because the game isn’t writing the config or I did something wrong but it seems to work okay, I don’t guarantee that my settings will work 100% with your own setups so a bit of tweaking on your part might be necessary.
First HD youtube upload so enjoy!
I might still be still processing as of this post but should be all good in a few hours time.

Un-boxing the package

Shiny new K-7's box

K-7's manuals & software cd

Battery and extra bits the come with the K-7

Finally:

My brand new Pentax K-7 with Tamron SP 90mm lens in all its glory (lens not included)

Well that’s all from me for now I’ll stick photos taken with the camera later

All photos were taken with my old K100D Super.

I had requested a Force-a-Nature tee and a Team Fortress 2 coffee mug to be ordered for me.
Although I haven’t tried on the teeshirt, the coffee mug is simply awesome.Of all things the first thing I tried putting in it was beer, managing to fit 330ml of it with about probably 10~15ml to spare.
Anyways the mug is great  it feels solid, the handle has enough clearance so when you hold it you don’t burn your hand on the mug, the rather thick walls of the mug does help to keep its contents warm for a decent amount of time.
It’s also apparently big enough to perfectly dunk a Krispy Kreme donut into it.

So in conclusion; the Team Fortress 2 Coffee Mug besides being a rather good beer mug, performs its duty very well.
Keeping your cup of Joe warm for extended periods of time, allowing easy access for donuts, preventing burns on your knuckles and looking rather good on any geek or office worker’s desk.

You can get yourself one aswell from the the Valve Store here.

The results surprised me as it ran on high settings with 2xAA and 2xAF very well.
All the UI elements didn’t look messed up and everything rendered very nicely it was as if the game was made for multi-monitor setups.

The only thing that was messed up by the huge resolution was the main menu’s background.
Otherwise everything was sweet.
Here’s a test run jumped into a random game, in this case the finale of No Mercy.

I used the same config as my Team Fortress 2 attempt, which can be grabbed from here.

After reading this article from Multimonitor.net showing that it was possible to get Team Fortress 2 to run on triple monitors with a program that emulates Matrox’s TripleHead2Go‘s functions – SoftTH.

I decided to give it a shot so after a good two hours of google, trial and error I finally got Team Fortress 2 working on my three Samsung 2243BWs.
It seemed to have a bit of difficulty running on Windows 7 Build 7077 so it took me a bit longer than anticipated.
Check out the test run on my Youtube video below.

You can give SoftTH a shot too, download it from the developer’s site.
Grab my config file from here, just copy paste the code into your config file and it should work.

Update 6/11/2010: The latest Team Fortress 2 update has broken SoftTH 1.08 and 1.09c, a workaround for this is to run TF2 in DirectX 8 with the command “-dxlevel 80″, you’ll lose quality but you can get your game on.

First on the list was an Asus 4350 for a low, low $69 and then got my set of Crucial Ballistix RMAed luckily the lady I bought my ram from was nice enough to swap it for me on the spot as I had rang ahead the day before.

Second on the list is a Solid State Hard Drive that I had bought off the Overclockers Australia forums from MR CHILLED.

The 2.5′ drive is manufactured by the Team Group Inc, runs dead quiet and extreamly fast.
So far I haven’t done any testing with benchmarks as of yet but from what I’ve seen its quick.
The main reason I wanted to buy the drive was to give Windows 7 Beta a spin, so armed with my ssd and an iso of Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 64 bit.

I proceeded to install Windows onto my new drive, it proved painless to install and overal the installation didn’t take very long I would probably estimate about 15~20mins.
Booting up Windows 7 was a really surreal exercise coming from many years of listening to hard drives spin up during boot up, specially the noisy 74gb Western Digital Raptor that my old Vista 64 installation that I’ve been using for the past year.
What greeted me was Windows booting up in mare seconds and just the cooling fans spinning.

It’s still early days with the Windows 7 Beta but it’s shaping up to be quite good.
Boot times are great, driver support is much better than Vista 64 with most of my stuff actually working; the only problem that I’ve noticed with the Beta is that it has issues with older USB devices which seems to cause it to crash, and a few minor networking issues.
Windows 7 seems much more responsive that Vista in most cases and most software works on it.

And what was the purpose of buying that 4350?
To finally be able to hook a 22′ Dell E228WFP to my current setup of two Samsung 2243BWs.

Here’s what my desktop now looks like.

It just so happened that I was in the market for a new monitor as my old Chimei CMV 22D was showing its age, I was planning on getting one of them new fangled 24” monitors fokes have been raving on about.
So as I wondered around the fair I looked at the prices of 24” monitors more specifically the Samsung 245BW all the while keeping in mind the price that was offered to staff at my work. After a quick look around the prices were to say the least high ($600 Hurr Hurr) but it was then I saw my soon to be monitor the Samsung 2243BW I fell in love with it and snapped it up for $299 plus the woman who sold me the monitor knew my father so she was nice enough to not charge us for use of Eftpos usage as she was not able to reduce the price on the monitor and further.

So there you have it as I walked out of the fair I was one happy chap.
Now I guessing people are asking was it worth my $299? As this monitor was most likely more expensive than other brands such as ASUS or BenQ. In short it was damn worth the money.

It features a small swivel base for 360* rotation, an adjustable stand, the monitor has decent tilt capability, and comes with no not normal buttons no-sir-y it has TOUCH SENSITIVE buttons for controls which is a lovely touch to the extra thin bezel which ~0.5 inches wide all around. Connectivity consists of both DVI and VGA so for those still on VGA it’s useful.
I did not find any problems with the tilt and height adjustments though the screen did wobble without toppling over if it was bumped or after I had adjusted its settings.
Now onto the meat and potatoes, how did the screen look when it came to showing the colours.
All I can say is excellent, though I don’t have professional tools to see how well the monitor displays its colours and such I do have a variety of games, movies and games to see how well the monitor did its job in a normal environment.
Films and anime were much more vibrant while games were richer in colour, and shaper. Text is sharp, clean and crisp; as expected of an LCD. The pre-sets on the monitor were decent but were not really to my liking, overall the monitor’s colour is very nice although its factory settings are rather bright and saturated for my liking which does not do any favours for long viewing or bright backgrounds such as when working with word documents. There is some light bleed around the screen that is most prominent on the top and bottom edges of the screen.
Here are some pics of the monitor on my normal desktop and a photo of the lightbleed

In other news dad got me a gift the gift of sound no I can hear perfectly fine he got me a very nice set of Sennheiser S555 audiophile headphones and damn these headphones are nice not only in style they sound brilliant. They have decent bass for headphones and music (cd quality) sound very rich, plus they’re very comfy to wear for long periods of time thanks to it being an open headphone design though it wont block out or seal in sound as well as my previous set a Panasonic RP-HTX7. But never-the-less I am very happy with them games sound great, music sounds great and they’re comfy to wear what more can I ask for?
Pic of them sitting on my laptop below.