If you didn’t get the idea from the graphic, I plan to build a (somewhat) reasonably priced system that will run with the best of them. I plan to upgrade this box into a top-of-the-line system for less than $1,500. Part 1 is a Rundown of my old system (so we can see what we need to upgrade):

Case: Chieftec Dragon Case
 

Description: This case is roomy, sturdy, and has lasted 10 years.

Upgrade? No

Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650-Watt TX Series 80 Plus Certified Power Supply

Description: This PSU isn’t even breaking a sweat on my current setup.

Upgrade? No

CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 630 95W AM3 2MB 2800MHz
 

Description: I bought this CPU nearly two years ago. It was my first quad-core and has served me well. However, As AMD adds more cores to their CPUs Intel continues to increase performance using only four. I’m going to definitely be looking into building my first intel system this go-around.

Upgrade? Yes

Memory: Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 Desktop Memory

Description: DDR2 ram has served me well, but DDR3 is faster and a heck of a lot cheaper. I live in constant fear of DDR3 prices rising!

Upgrade? YES

Motherboard: MSI 790XT-G45

Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 5770 1 GB Ram

Description: for 100 bucks this card is amazing, but we are definitely going to be upgrading this bad boy.

A video demo of the upcoming ‘tablet-friendly’ Microsoft Windows 8 has been posted on All Things D from their D9 conference.

The shift from Windows 7 is mind-blowing and very Windows Phone 7 like. Boasting such features as fast application switching, multi-application view, on-screen keyboard, touch-tailored applications, the ability to run legacy style apps, web-services integration, and much more. Like Windows 7, it’s supposed to be compatible (optimized to run) with all current generation hardware.

via All Things D

Gotta love more video streaming services.  My wife and I currently are members of Amazon Prime.  Believe me it is worth it if you shop online at Amazon a lot, which is something we do too much.

Revisiting fellow pundit Kary Brown’s CPU Manifesto, along with various discussions on the Techpedition Podcast, led me to the PC Perspective Hardware Leaderboard.  What is the ‘Hardware Leaderboard’? The hardware leaderboard is PC Perspective’s list of the  components needed to build the best personal computer you can get for your hard earned dollars at various price points. The systems range from the best budget system you can build, all the way up to the current dream system you could build if money were no object. Basically it’s the dummy’s guide to building a great system. And as mentioned earlier, my eyes were squarely set on the budget system. Let’s take a look at the specs.

Budget System Component List

What I Got

•  AMD Athlon II X4 635 – Processor
• Gigabyte Socket ATX Motherboard GA-770TA-UD3 – Motherboard
• Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 PCI-Express Graphics Card 100287VGAL – Video Card
• Corsair XMS3 2 GB Memory Kit  – Memory
• Corsair CMPSU-450VX 450-Watt Power Supply – Power Supply

What I Skipped

• Western Digital Caviar Blue WD10EALS Hard Drive 1 TB – Hard Drive

What I Added

• Antec Three Hundred Gaming Case – Gaming Case
• An Additional Corsair XMS3 2 GB Memory Kit  – Memory
• Old Hard Drive

The Hardware Leaderboard page has an in depth summary of each component, so I won’t really go into details there. But, as you can see from my component list above, I took some liberties by dropping the Caviar Hard Drive that may have cost me a bit of performance hit in the end. This was more than an acceptable divulgence of the original specifications to stay within my budget. Adding the case put me over the top and I had to make a sacrifice somewhere. Besides, nothing is keeping me from upgrading the hard drive at a future date. Additionally I opted to double the memory which I was sure would add a bit of performance gain.

Conclusion

All in all, building a great system with the PC Perspective guide is trivial. Like I previously stated, ‘a dummies guide to building a great PC’. I didn’t really want to cover the assembly of the system because there are plenty of guides out there for that. But I think it’s more than important to talk about performance, which I’ll cover in my next article.

Tech head or not, the Hardware Leaderboard has done the hard work, and provided us a sure fire way to get a quality PC up and running with little or no problem. Next up, we’ll talk performance.

Stay Tuned For “The Budget System: Part 2 – Performance”

When I got it home, and plugged it in, it worked.  It booted up and got all the way into Windows.  This was much more than I expected it to do.  After surfing through multiple login pages and canceling the network password check I was able to do a status check of all the hardware and get some specs from it.

600 mHz Pentium 3
64 MB of SDRAM
8GB Hard Drive Space

Both video and audio were on-board and the USB ports were 1.0, so I’m not working with a completely defunct dinosaur. What I find very interesting is that the back of the computer had a key hole and a set of keys to lock and unlock the case. The lock was “supposed” to prevent me from getting to the case, but I didn’t learn this until I had already ripped off the case with the lock still locked. Oh well.

The motherboard and case setup is not your typical ATX standard, or at least not that I can tell. I will need to do a bit more research to find what I can fit on this Motherboard however, it does look like it has 3 distinct PCI slots. Those will come in handy.

I plan on tinkering with this PC in the coming months, and getting it upgraded enough to run Windows 2000, XP, or even 7. 2000 is my dad’s prefered OS if I plan on returning it, but I want to go big and try to squeeze 7 on it. I will be posting my progress regularly and hope to have it finished sometime next year. Wish me luck!!!

Unlike Windows Media Player, or the Zune software, iTunes does not have built in folder monitoring. What is folder monitoring? Folder monitoring is when the player library searches (monitors) one or more folders and check for any changes. If a new item is added to the folders, then it is also added to the library. If a file is removed from the folder, then it is removed from the library. Why is this important? Simple. Most people have one core folder that they keep their music in. And instead of having to manually add new content to your iTunes library every time something is added to that folder, folder monitoring could automatically do this for you. Yes, making music management a heck of a lot easier.

Fortunate for us, there is a handy third-party tool that can help alleviate the pain, iTunes Folder Watch. A product of klarita.net, iTunes Folder Watch is offered as free-to-try-ware, which continues to work in manual mode, even after the trial period is over. Aside from the nag screen on startup and shutdown, this software is worth more than its weight in gold.

After installing the software and booting it up for the first time, you will be presented with the following screenshot (a). This part is pretty self-explanatory. Here, under the ‘Watch Folder’ tab, you can select the folders you wish to monitor for iTunes import. Next go the ‘Configuration’ tab. Here you can fine tune your iTunes import experience, such as scanning for dead track on startup, adding your imported tracks to a playlist, allowing it to start on windows boot up, and allowing your tracks to be monitored automatically without intervention.

Run a quick scan to find new tracks to be imported, click the ‘New Tracks’ tab (c), then hit the add checked tracks to iTunes and viola, your tracks are imported. Like I said before, if you ante up the dough to buy the full version, this program can run in the background and this will be done without intervention.

Apple should really consider scooping up this software or adding this functionality in their self. It is a much needed edition to iTunes that will keep your library happy!

Wow. A lot has changed in the CPU world since I upgraded my computer early last year.

I was browsing Newegg yesterday and noticed that you can snag a quad core processor from AMD for $99. No, that isn’t a typo. With prices as low as ever I decided to go through a budget system build. I will be using some of the info from the Hardware Leaderboard form PC Perspective (If you haven’t checked it out, do so!).

First a bit of history. Last year I upgraded my current computer system by purchasing a new motherboard ( ECS BLACK SERIES A780GM-A), a new CPU ( AMD Athlon 64 X2 7750 Kuma 2.7GHz), and a new graphics card ( MSI R4830-T2D512 OC Radeon HD 4830 ). These components have served me well, but I am looking to further augment my system because of my new High definition Video Requirements.

CPUs are obviously one of the single most important components in any system. However, you don’t want to overbudget here. I only bought dual-core last year because I knew I would only be playing games. Quad-core CPUs show a negligible increase in performance for games.

However, when you start doing other things (like *cough* video editing) those precious cores are worth their weight in gold because they can significantly decrease your rendering time. It took my Athlon X2 12 hours to encode a one hour video (with 2-pass .h264). To get that time down, I was looking to buy a new system (I started looking at Core i-7s). I was excited to get the performance increase, but I wasn’t excited about the cost. Fortunately, I noticed something wonderful right in front of my face.

To be completely honest I never noticed that this CPU was a Quad-core on PCPer (I guess I should read more). Like I said earlier, I was browsing newegg reading reviews when I saw it. This thing is an insane value for the price, and makes buying anything below a higher-end core i5 (if you are an intel fanboy) make no sense (even THAT is a push considering you can get a 6-core AMD for $200).

The other great thing about this CPU is that it is AM3. AM3 cpus are backwards compatible with AM2/+ motherboards, and they have both DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers built in. What that means is that I can drop this CPU into my current setup and it should work just fine! Win.

If you are considering the Intel path, that is another important area. You won’t be able to upgrade just one thing. You will probably have to upgrade your CPU, RAM, and Mobo at the same time (as Intel changes their sockets quite often).

I plan on buying this CPU in the near future, so stay tuned for comparisons and a review (if you don’t want to wait for my comparison, Anandtech has a review here).

I always liked Palm, just that  there was no way I was gonna become a Sprint customer, also wish the Pre was bigger, and a slider, and higher resolution screen.  That is all.

Thankfully motherboards have very standard drivers now and can boot from USB cause I hated building computers and then needing a floppy disk drive to install a third party SATA driver so I could install Window’s XP on the hard drive.  You will not be missed three and a half inch floppy.

Hey guys, what are your fondest or worst memories with floppies, 3.5 inch and 5.25 inch. (Oregon Trail Baby!!)

Why Aggregate Your Information? Ultimately, this is an easy means of sharing your online activity with friends and followers from other services. For instance, people are posting videos all the time on Facebook from YouTube. You can easily make this a minimal task by installing the YouTube application on Facebook. What does this mean? Well, now every time you ‘heart’ or upload a YouTube video, it will automatically be posted to your Facebook account. This in just one example of how this would work. And there are plenty of Facebook applications that cover almost every service imaginable.

Post Once, Post Everywhere. Twitter is probably one of be best examples of a service that other services consume. What’s so great about this. Post once, post everywhere. For instance, when I make one Twitter post, that same post goes to Facebook, Friendfeed, and my website. By having one place to post, it allows me to update various sites, while only having to worry about just one. This is good because it allows you to give updates to friends/followers who may use only one network.

Ways To Aggregate. Many of the social networks allow you to aggregate data from external services such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, or your blog. Here’s a few.

• Facebook Applications
• Friendfeed Services
• MySpace Applications

Privacy Implications. Some would prefer not to do things like this over privacy concerns. Point taken. But I live under the assumption that almost anything I do on the internet is not private anyway, so this doesn’t bother me in the least. Bottom line is, if you post anything on the internet, automatically assume anyone can see it and act accordingly. This also applies to mobile applications that provide location based tagging. This rule should judge all you internet activity anyway.

A few years back a friend of mine discovered their parents were on Facebook. If you could have seen the look on his face and the panic as he feverishly scrambled to remove any inappropriate things from his page. On another note, I really didn’t have to worry about that when I discovered my parent were on Facebook. I accepted the friend request without a hitch. I repeat, when posting on the internet, assume everyone can see everything!

Stalkers? Okay, we just talked about privacy concerns when posting information, and we know that you should only post things you feel comfortable with other people knowing. But what about the aggregation of this information in one place and stalker (or noisy people)? A dreamland for a stalker right? Here are a few rules for keeping would be stalkers at bay.

1. Only aggregate more general data publicly.
2. Reserve more public information for certain networks.
3. Check public versus private setting for each network.
4. Keep more sensitive information within a particular network and don’t aggregate.
5. Since friends and followers can instantly see your information, only friend or follow people you trust.

Final Thoughts. Don’t be afraid to embrace social networks and get connected. Ultimately, this is a great way to stay in touch with friend that you may have never had the chance to before. Once again, embrace technology, but also follow my number one rule for posting things on the internet. Stay connected!