Alden Bates' Weblog

A couple of months ago I bought my current computer from First In who had it as their daily special (they've featured the system several times since then). So how's it looking so far?

Well, it's nice and fast, particularly when playing Unreal Tournament, and I've finally been able to play Doom 3 (I wasn't brave enough to try installing it on my old PC). It hasn't crashed except that one time but that was because XP doesn't really deal with dud drivers well and no reflection on the hardware.

The only problem I've had with it (other than the absence of a floppy drive, though that's not really much of a handicap in this day and age, plus it has a flashcard reader instead) is that every time I play a video file, I get this popup in the top-right corner of the screen saying "Powered by ASUS Splendid video enhancement technology".

Although, I've just discovered how to switch that off, so, er, never mind! (it was hiding in the display settings)

System specs for the curious:

• AMD 65W Athlon 64 X2 EE 4200+ Dual Core 64Bit SKT AM2 2000MHZ Hyper Transport CPU
• ASUS M2N ATX AMD Socket AM2 DDR2 PCIeX16*1 RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, JBOD GLAN
• APACER DDR2 512MB 8C 240PIN 667Mhz PC2-5300 Ram
• SEAGATE 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3Gb/s 8MB cache Barracuda 7200.10
• Pioneer High-quality DVR-111D DVDRW Black OEM Dual Layer DVD Writer w/industry-leading write speeds & performance
• Cyberlink 8-IN 1 DVD Solution CD/DVD Burning
• PowerDVD 7 & Creativity Suite
• ASUS Extreme N7600GT/2DHT/256M PCI-E HDTV
• Raidmax Ninja Gaming Tower Case black w/520W ATX PSU 20+4pin 80mm Blue LED fan
• Laser 16 IN 1 USB card reader writer black internal 3.5" CF/SD/SM/MM/MS/XD