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!

Update and a little Haiku

I haven't updated this for a while, and for good reason! I haven't really been bothered ever since the hectic Haloscan activity. It was quite nice getting more than 1 hit a month. Anyway, an update on my current technological situation. Ahem...

The desktop which I was (and still am) quite proud of is still here! [shock horror, it hasn't been upgraded]. It's specs are as follows, in case you didn't get it from my previous Ode:

Asus P5B Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo e6600 2.4GHz OC to 2.7GHz
OCZ Platinum 2GB 667MHz Memory
BFG 8800GTX 768MB Nvidia GFX
300GB 7200rpm Internal HDD
Windows Vista Home Premium

Which is just about adequate for my needs. I've also recently bought a laptop to fulfil my dualscreen and mobile computing fetishes. It's an old HP Compaq n620c. The nice people I bought it from gave me a free upgrade, it was supposed to be a 933MHz Pentium, but they gave me a 1.3GHz one instead. Much happiness!

Gold Star Award! To go back to my dualscreen point, I found a very nifty program called Synergy2. It allows you to use a secondary computer as if it was another monitor of the primary computer. What this means is that I can play Bioshock on my desktop (Bioshock is teh orsm) and chat to random friends on MSN using the same keyboard and mouse! Pretty awesome stuff imho although it's not totally like dualscreen, in that you can't drag a window across to the other screen. That would require a massive amount of coding and would be a waste of resources, like having two browser windows open on the same page.

I found out a very annoying thing about Vista Home Premium, it won't let me Remote Desktop Connect to it. Very annoyed... Oh well! I'll get around it somehow.

Oh Windows Vista
You cost me the world and more
And yet you still crash

Ode to a desktop

Farewell to my MacBook Pro
And a fond and joyful Hello
To my new Intel Core 2 Duo
With an 8800GTX
With 2GB Platinum OCZ
My computer is now teh sex

:)

Oh and it has Vista