My rather ill-executed attempt to install my free HDD

Just taking a break from implementing my final year project, an Automated Student Attendance System, and relaxing by blogging! Anything to relieve the boredom!

As some of you may know from reading my Twitter, I got a free 250GB IDE HDD from my Dad. What you may not know is that my motherboard only has 1 IDE slot which are taken up by my optical drives. Luckily (I then thought) I have an IDE>SATA Converter which will do what it suggests it does. So I install that (after realising that it can be installed wrongly, despite the little notch) and happily boot up my system only to find that it runs an actual 10x slower! Now, file transfers usually average around 30MB/s. This converter was only giving me 3MB/s! Meaning that something that could've taken 6 minutes was taking an hour!

I realise about here that this is an extremely tedious blogpost. So I'll cut this extremely dull story short:

• I sacrificed the use of my optical drives to enable me to use the extra hard drive while my PCI IDE Controller is on order from eBay
• I then rejigged my drive layout using Acronis PartitionExpert

And now this blog has bored me more than my project. I'll write some better stuff later!

A long overdue update

Hello there veritable plethora of Blogger readers and friends! (Yes I realise only about 2 people, if I'm lucky, will read this; but it stops me from getting bored at 04:34 as I'm too cold to be tired)

As you may have guessed, I'm cold and tired and blogging. "What's brought this on?", I don't hear anyone say. Well, I have signed up to Twitter and I noticed that you can add a Blogger widget! Ham-azing.

Too many things have happened since (feigns checking last post date since I've actually remembered it after previewing what damage the Twitter widget did) December 2007 to go over in detail, so I'll try and keep it short, snappy and interesting (my thesaurus skills are lacking tonight, but my interjection technique is bang on).

I'm getting a heap of stuff from my dad, including a 42" LCD HD Ready TV! Flippin' Nora!
I have dual monitors and an Xbox 360! Ownage!
I have uninstalled Vista and reverted back to XP! Relief!
I tried out Opera but found it uncompromisingly unintuitive and so went back to Firefox and Thunderbird after a brief email export/import scare! Good for me!
I'm looking forward to implementing the Automated Student Attendance System for my Final Year Project! Great!
I've formed and play (badly) in a 6-a-side football team! Healthy!
I still have World Domination aspirations! Doubleplusgood!

And, over the course of the 1 and a bit years, I have found many a program and extension which has helped me on my merry technological way. Here are a few of them now in fact!
CmdHere PowerToy for Windows XP
Link Shell Explorer Extension
"Open File Location" Explorer Extension
Process Explorer
QTAddressBar Explorer Extension
Speed Dial for Firefox
Ultramon
Unlocker Assistant
VistaVG Skin for XP

There's quite a few there. I'll go over them in subsequent posts, just to give me something to blog about. Fun times.