blur

My ASUS motherboard comes with MyLogo, meaning I can change the logo of the BIOS to whatever I want. It’s a nice feature – my last ASUS board didn’t have it. However, I currently have the logo turned off. I like the "old fashioned" BIOS POST screen that shows a bunch of white text on a black background. I have noticed that part of that text says "PC-800" memory. Today, I thought, wait a minute, I’m pretty sure I didn’t buy PC-800. So I went to newegg and checked what I had bought. Sure enough, it was PC-8200/1066. Then I noticed in the motherboard user guide that "if you install PC-1066 you need to let the BIOS know." I also manually set the timing to 5-5-5-15 (I have no idea what that means, but that’s what it’s supposed to be) since I wasn’t sure if the BIOS "AUTO Timing" feature was working right. My computer is not running any faster that I can tell, but, hey, if I wanted my memory to run at PC-800 I would have paid for PC-800 (that’s slower than PC-1066 BTW.)

Next, I looked up the difference between S1 and S3 sleep. S3 is "Suspend to RAM" (STR). For some reason, the BIOS default is AUTO, which in XP defaults to S1. This is probably because if you AUTO to S3, and your OS doesn’t support it, bad things happen. Anyway, I enabled S3 and it works. A nifty feature of S3 (well, and S1) is "Resume on… (various device)", where various device can be modem (does anyone have those anymore? lol), PS/2 mouse or keyboard (USB doesn’t work! which is another reason S3 is not the default), or something more interesting… like wake on LAN (WOL). What does that mean, you ask? That mean I can use my computer as a server (like SSH from work to bypass the firewall) and leave it in sleep mode, so it’s not wreaking havoc on my energy bill, and when a computer tries to connect to it, it will turn on. Pretty spiffy. After I’m done using it remotely, it will go back to sleep.

By request…

The power cord, the bottom of the power supply fan, black USB to external 160GB HDD, blue USB to USB 1.x hub (mouse, web cam, and digital camera, one free – maybe bluetooth, which is currently in one of the front side usb on the case), white USB to keyboard, gray USB to external CD/DVD everything burner, yellow CAT5 to router, green audio to speakers, and blue VGA to monitor with the DVI to VGA adaptor visible.

(more…)

For those not-in-the-know, I have indeed built a new computer. It is either simply amazing or highly disappointing, depending on which way you look at it. Here is a brief rundown of the system specs:

• Antec Sonata III case. Black. 1×120mm rear fan. Front air filter. Etc, blah. It’s a case. Front audio in/out, 2x USB, and eSATA port (nifty but probably will never use.)
• Asus P5K Pro motherboard. Could say a lot here. 6 SATA connectors, 4 bootable, 2 data. RAID 0/1/5/10 (Not using RAID as you’ll later see.) 8 Channel audio. 6 rear USB. Firewire, 6 pin plug. 2 PS/2 – mouse and keyboard. 10/100/1000 LAN. 2 PCI-x16 slots, although only one is x16, other is x4 or x1.
• Intel 3.0GHz Dual Core Wolfdale CPU. 45nm. 6mb shared cache. In short, blazing fast. 1333MHz FSB.
• Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4850 video card. 512MB RAM GDDR3. DX10. 625MHz core, RAM at 993 MHz. HDMI ready. Blah blah. 2x DVI out, 1x S-Video out. DVI to VGA and DVI to HDMA adaptors. S-video to Component and S-Video to Composite adaptors.
• 2GB DDR2 RAM. Not sure of the clock speed.
• 500GB Seagate SATA-2 (ie, 3Gb/s)
• XP Home SP3

Sound card (RealTek HDA – High Definition Audio) supports multistream. I can play two different things at the same time – one through the speakers (back plug) and the other through the headphones (front plug.) I was pretty amazed by that.

I think that covers it. Used an old Samsung SyncMaster 955DF 19" monitor at 1280×1024 @ 75hz. No internal optical drive – I use my external USB DVD/CD everything burner by LiteOn.