News From Gordy

Acer Aspire One

I've been looking into the netbook fad for sometime. Clients keep talking about getting them so it was time to get one to test out.

I looked at several different ones, but the clear winner on spec and price was the Acer Aspire One. It came to around £200 from PC world.  I cannot believe how powerful this thing is for it's size. The first thing I did though is junk the linspire os as it was terrible. I then upgraded the ram to 1.5GB and stuck in an apple wireless N card.  Next on the list was an install of OS X. With 120gb to play with the small screen and atom cpu you have the perfect macbook mini!

It also has been a great hit with my little boy, it keeps him entertain with Bob the builder and pingu on long journeys.  Anyone who has seen it, instantly wants one which is most unlike other laptops and computers.

My only complaints so far is that it's hard to upgrade the internals, so requires completely taking apart for even a simple RAM upgrade.

Useful links:

My Acer Aspire One Gallery
Guide for sticking OS X on the Acer Aspire One
Taking the Acer Aspire One apart guide and video

19-09-08 21:52:29

Saracen Mantra 3 Mountain Bike

After many years of sitting on my bottom staring at a computer screen it was time to get fit again. I used to love mountain biking back in the day and we have a huge park and wood with lots of trails behind the house. It would be rude not to make use of it!

Lots had changed since I last rode, it was a whole new world, but I eventually picked up a Saracen Mantra 3 off Ebay. Its a great little bike, it's a wee bit heavy, but should be bullet proof. I had to get few extra bits for it. First of which were a crud catcher some Sram gripshifters (First bike with them and I love them! The original shifters were wierd for my fingers.)and a bottle cage. I had a few rides and decided to get some new brakes too. I saw some superb Avid Juicy Ultimates on ebay. They have carbon levers and look ace. I still need to tweak them a bit before their first ride, but first impressions is that they rock.

I also noticed that the standard method manitou give you for attaching the front brake hose is as reliable as windows ME, I found a simple system produced by the brand M:part which seemed much better. It uses rubber O rings and little aluminium guides. It works very well.

As usual more pics in the gallery: here

02-04-07 19:50:25

Eric the baby

It's been a while since I updated the site, I've been very busy. Mainly it's down to having lots of work on at the moment, but also it's down to having a cute baby to play with.

Eric was born at the start of December and is doing very well. He's very well behaved and extremely cute, not that I'm biased!

There are hundreds more pictures of him in the gallery here.

02-04-07 19:39:20

Proavio dvBox Pro

I've just picked up a new external hard disc enclosure, I've been looking for a replacement for my Lacie Mini hard disc enclosure that sat under my girlfriends Apple Mac mini, as even with the 500gb hard disc I'd crammed in, I was running out of space.

I've been looking for some kind of two drive external enclosure to cram a second disc into. I'd seen a few options but none looked very attractive. I then saw the Proavio dvBox Pro on Scan.co.uk and I knew that it was what I was looking for.

I checked the specs out which don't really give a lot of help, so I just bit the bullet and ordered it

When it arrived I came across an issue hooking it up as its built for firewire 800 connectors and I have a firewire 400 connection instead. I hadn't realized the cable was different for the two types. I thought I would have to send the drive back, but quick google search showed up a cable that would work for me! I struggled to find one under £20.00, but in the end I discovered one on ebuyer for under £2! Once it arrived I finally got to hook it up to my computer.

I wanted to install just one drive first then copy all the files across the network to it as the old drive was formatted for mac. If I didn't transfer everything across it would be lost eeeeek. I had a few problems mainly down to the shocking manual included, or piece of paper as it was! It didn't give any directions that would help me so I just threw the drive in and plugged it in. Needless to say it didn't work grrr. I eventually discovered that the first drive has to be added as master and the RAID 0 Jumper removed to treat the drives as separate discs.

Once I had that sussed I realized that it was very noisy for some reason Proavio use two small 40mm fans for cooling and they are very very noisy. The drives don't get very warm so I unplugged the fans after a few hours as the noise was doing my head in!

The included stands are poorly finished so I didn't bother using them as the rubber sticky feet seem to hold the drive off the desk fine on their own

On to the pictures

Overall its a very good little enclosure, the fans and feet need improving though

29-10-06 14:15:38

Dell's new AMD machines

Well I've finally recieved my first AMD specified Dell, I've been waiting for them to include AMD chips for sometime now. Its nice to see it happen at long last.

It doesn't seem to different to the Intel machines just the AMD x2 sticker on the front to indicate the change. This one here uses their custom small form factor chassis, which is in the BTX vain with the heatsink near the front of the machine. Its quite well laid out.

There are lots of rev A01 stickers everywhere so this is one of the very first machines!

The motherboard is a nvidia based solution, that looks like it has been custom made for dell. I ordered this one about 1 and 1/2 weeks ago, it took some time to arrive. Looking on the dell site now its no longer listed which is odd. There are the normal dimension based intel systems and one AMD now, but its the larger ATX sized case

Specs of the machine

Dell Dimension C521
AMD X2 4200+ dual core 2.20ghz processor
2x 512mb DDR2 Dual Channel 533mhz RAM
Ati X1300 128mb graphics card

I've now had a chance to test out the machine, its very quick indeed. It came with all the usual dell software rubbish installed. AOL, McAfee etc. I cleaned all this off updated windows and the ATI drivers and gave it a quick spin on pifast and 3d mark 2006. The machine itself was very quiet, the main fan span up initially then tapered off gradually till the only noise I could hear was the hard disc activity.

Pifast results

I used Hexus pifast tool to see how quick it was.

Series computing time : 47.59
Division time : 5.80
InvSqrt time : 3.59
Final huge multiplication time : 2.44

Total computation time : 59.61 seconds(~ 0.02 hours)

3d mark 2006

Overall Score: 874
HDR SM3.0 Score: 327
CPU Score: 1646

I downloaded and ran the latest 3d Mark 2006 and it ran quite slowly, thats not very surpising considering the graphics card isn't targetting at the gamer. Its actually a half height pci-ex card with tv out and dvi ouput.

I then to a trip to the BIOS to see what tweaks there was in there. I was dissapointed, apart from a hard disc noise setting there was no performance options at all. Not a massive surprise seeing as this is a dell, but one can hope.

I also took the time to inspect the inside of the case in a bit more detail. I saw two interesting things, firstly there is an unused USB header inside as well as space to put another IDE connector on the board which dell seem to have decide to leave blank. I also noted that they have not bothered with ps2 ports which is good to see, why these are still giving motherboard space is beyond me! The psu is a custom dell one which states it is 280W in size.

Full Gallery

02-10-06 16:39:13

Gordy Site and Personal Update

Hi all, hope you all are well.

Just a quick news update to give you an idea of whats happening with me, firstly and most importantly can I please introduce and mini-gordy. He/she is due in decemeber and we are really looking forward to it!

Secondly we have just picked up a very cute kitten, we have named her Oscar (long story!) any way here she is

More pictures in Gallery

Thirdly there has been some serious downtime on the gallery, its due to a failed upgrade of the gallery software. I had to do a reinstall of the software which has broken a lot of the links. Bare with me I am getting to them as fast as I can!

02-09-06 23:40:56

Gordy News Update

Hi all sorry for the lack of updates I've been snowed under as usual! I've just moved into a new house and that's taken all my DIY skills so I've not had a chance to do much work on the site.

What I had done on the modding front is install my new cubit 3 system which rocks! I've just bought a new Dell 2007fp monitor as well. I will add some pictures and stuff in the next couple of days, when I've finished building my all new desk!

31-07-06 15:06:27

PC World demoing bootcamp!

I've just come back from a bit of shopping and I popped into to PC World for a wonder around. I got as far as the small Apple section they have there and was surprised to find a Macbook Pro. Not only that it was running windows! They were advertising the new bootcamp features to try to attract some new apple switchers. I didn't think I'd see the day they could get a member of the purple shirt brigade to do something that complicated!

I took a quick picture with my mobile to show it in action, they'd even installed 3dmark on it

They have put a small note explaining that this is a demo software and requires a full copy of windows XP for you to copy this setup.

01-05-06 17:28:14

MacBook Pro and Bootcamp

Its been a while since my last update, I've been very busy trying to buy a new house and sell my old one. I've got lots of mods planned for when I get my all new workshop area so keep your eye's peeled for more.

On the site front I've been mainly working on my MacBook Pro over the last few weeks getting bootcamp up and running and taking it to lans. Its the perfect lan rig. Far easier than taking a shuttle or similiar!

Check out my article on boot camp here

01-05-06 17:12:10

iPod and Macbook Pro

Hi all not updated the site for a while as I've been snowed under with real life stuff I'm afraid.
I'm near the end of that so there should be some new updates in the next few weeks.

I've just got a new apple ipod, its the 30gb video version in black. I've stuck some pictures up with the foofpod I got to go with it in the gallery please check them out.

Also I've had a macbook pro on preorder for some time,its now arrived for gordy to have a proper play at long last!

Its the Intel 2.0ghz Duo Core with 2gb of DDR2 ram, 100Gb hard drive and the X1600 256mb graphics card. First impressions are that its sweeeeeeet!

22-02-06 18:18:40