System Building

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Mark Urbin

I’ve been thinking about building a new desktop and finally bit the bullet and ordered a bunch of parts.

One of the first things to arrive was the Cooler master HAF 932 Advanced Full Tower Case.

w00t! This thing is big!  It comes with three 230mm fans.  One on front, one on the side and the last one on the top.  If that isn’t enough airflow, you can replace the side fan with four 120mm fans, and the top one with three 120mm fans.  I’m going to stick with the default fans for now.

The 800 Watt power supply also arrive, so I installed that. The Sandy Bridge processor and CPU cooler arrived, but not the thermal compound, so those are still in their boxes.

I figured this would have to last me a few years, so I went with the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme Z-LGA 1155 Z68 motherboard. Lots of I/O on this beast, including plenty of USB, 800 Firewire, ESATA and two Gig Ethernet ports.

Once the thermal paste and 8 Gig of RAM arrive, I’ll be able to install the motherboard.

The two other key components I’m waiting for is a  256 Gig SSD and a Samsung Blu-Ray reader/DVD writer optical drive.

Once I have those, I can fire it up and install Window 7 Ultimate, 64 bit.

Ya, I hear you.  No video card.  I’ll be cannibalizing  the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 out of my old system, which will have to get by with the on board graphics again. That and a 2 Gig 7200 RPM hard drive.

That should be enough to get me rolling and installing software.  I’ve also got a multi card reader on order, but I can always add that later on, especially since that seems to be the long pole in the shipping wait.  The old system will eventually end up in the basement, hooked up to the TV for the display and a wireless keyboard/trackball.  It’s got enough horse power to make a good music/movie server, and given the big screen on the TV, hopefully a decent device for stray web surfing.

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Did Tesla screw the pooch?

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Mark Urbin

As my loyal readers know, I’ve been a fan of the Tesla electric cars, both the Roadster and the Type S Sedan.

It does appear that they do appear to have a serious design flaw.

If you let the bloody things sit too long the battery will completely discharge and can’t be recharged!

If it hits that state, it’s a very expensive brick.  Has to be carted back to the factory and have the batteries replaced.

Cost estimates for that procedure range from $30,000 t $40,000.

It is flaws like this that are blocking widespread acceptance.

Oh, and that high end luxury car price tag.  You won’t see a lot of electric vehicles until they are price comparable with a used mini-van.  That is what it’s going to take to have soccer moms drive them.

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