Not only doesn’t it have Letters, it also has no cursor keys and no function keys! Well ok mine is dark gray and has black letters on it that can only be seen with enough light in the back. It”s a 66 keys Keyboard and all special keys can be accessed with the Fn key. It means you have to press two keys to use Cursor keys or Function Keys and if you want to press Shift+F1 you have to hold three keys at once. Quite a finger acrobatic trainer isn’t it? Not to mention that I also have to get used to the American layout.

I somehow feel back at the C64 where double and triple layered keys were the daily thing. This little black devil meanwhile went into my shelf to be replaced with my ten year old trusty Cherry Keyboard … three times by now! Finally I accepted to give it a longer try! Sure, Its masochism but the quality and feeling of the keys is so irresistible! Plus I got a lot more space free on my desk suddenly (you should know … space is the most expensive thing around here!)

So instead of buying an XPS 700 with a flatscreen, DVD, keyboard, mouse and Windows XP Home, all stuff that I don’t need I’ve decided to go again and choose all required parts from the ground up by myself. Here is how my next PC will look like …

Antec P180B Case (looks like a mini frigde but is very quiet and cool inside)
Antec Neo HE 550 PSU
Asus P5B Deluxe Motherboard
Pentium D 945 CPU (3.4 GHz)
Zalman CNPS9500 LED CPU Cooler (have to double check if it fits on the mobo without probs!)
2x Corsair XMS2 2GB (2x 1GB) 800 (PC2 6400) (4GB)
Leadtek Winfast PX7900 GTX TDH (more silent and cooler than comparable Radeon cards)
2x HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 250GB 7200RPM SATA

… Not only is it cheaper (though still quite steep) but it also means more memory and quite a bit more silence in our room than with the XPS. My last mainboard was an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe and I’m totally satisfied with it since it is running stable for about two years now. I think I’ll turn the old water-cooled Pentium4 into our Linux Server after this.

- Excellent sound quality! The included headphones are top notch IMHO and have enough bass that even Drum’n'Bass sounds good on them! The Volume can be cranked up pretty high too.
- 1 GB Memory = ~240 songs and 12 hours listening.
- Compact! One of the real good points on it! I can put it in the small sleeve pocket of my shirt or into the front pocket and jump around and it would not be in the way or annoy.
- Simple use! Only the most necessary functionality is included! Loudness up/down, Play/Pause, next/prev track, fast forward/backward (by holding the skip buttons), normal mode or shuffle play. That’s it and that’s what most people basically ever will need for an unhindered music experience.
- Sound quality is very good! (I said that already but I say it again )

Here the cons:
- iTunes! For me iTunes is one of the most user unfriendly tools ever seen! It runs sluggish and takes ages before you can use it (because it updates all kinds of stuff), it hijacks file types, re-installs Quicktime etc. etc…. all the nasty program! It first copies for whatever reason a selection of tunes from your collection to the iPod. When I start it, it tells me that it updates the iPod but I never tell him he should do that (and it cannot be turned off). After about one hour I was able to finally copy tunes to my iPod Shuffle! Once you have figured it out you can actually start enjoying the iPod which is a cool and useful gadget nevertheless!

CPU: Pentium4 3GHz 800MHz FSB

Motherboard: P4C800-E Deluxe (excellent board!)

RAM: 2x 512MB Corsair PC3200 2-3-2-6 (one of the best… and expensive!)

HD: 2x 160GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA (bound together as a Raid0 Array) (quiet and fast)

Video: Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (Top of the notch)

Sound: M-Audio Delta Audiophile 2496 (Finally a decent Pro audio card)

Powersupply: Aopen AO400-12APN (not too bad)

Case: Antec SX1000II (love it!)

HSF: Thermalright SLK948-U + Papst 92mm 2200RPM silent fan

… Do I have to say more? Maybe that this is an excellent configuration for not too much money. I don’t want to boast around but it was about time for such a system. The components fit together like a foot on a well worn sneaker!

The motherboard is one of the top class overclocking boards and runs rock stable here. I haven’t approached any overclocking on this system now (will do that when I feel it’s about time speaking the hardware gets out-of-date again). For a full review of the board read here. I’m now able to switch on my computer by pressing CTRL+ESC on my keyboard!

The boxed heatsinkfan for the Pentium4 was good at cooling but also loud like a compact car. So I’ve replaced it with the Thermalright HSF and put a 92mm 2200rpm Papst fan on top of it, blowing into the HSF. The two Hitachi Deskstar are not only fast but also very quiet so it turns out now that the loudest thing in the case is now the graphics card fan.

The Aopen Power supply was a purchase in the heat of the moment as I first wanted to buy a Zalman but such ones couldn’t be found here in Jp. So the Aopen had to do the job and it is doing it good and quiet as long as I don’t turn the throttle knob which is attached at the backside. This knob controls the fan speed and gives the option to cool down the power supply (and case) fastly. But at full speed it’s unacceptable loud. At low speed it’s below 24dB which is nice.

The M-Audio soundcard is not a consumer card but a card for people who using the computer for music creation (as I do) so it’s price is a little bit above the average though it’s a compared low price card for high quality. I hadn’t any problems with the card yet, neither on the audio production side nor on the gaming side. Audio latency is at a constant 12ms in all applications here. Cubase runs like a charm with it! In an act of materialism I’ve also bought the (M-Audio) Evolution UC-33e MIDI controller which is a gold mine and I love it but that stuff might be part of a future review.

European Vintage Computer Festival

CPU: Intel Pentium4 3,2GHz

Mainboard: either Asus P4C800-E Deluxe or MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R (yea, I know the Intel D875PBZ looks much cooler in it’s all black radiance but it only allows overclocking up to 4% which is a joke)

RAM: 1GB of DDR brand RAM

Harddisk: Seagate Barracuda ST3160023AS 160GB SATA

Case: (possibly) Antec Plus1080AMG or PlusView1000AMG

If I’m lucky with the prices, I will stay within the 1000 Euro range which is a good deal for this class of machine.

For a gfx card I’d possibly go for a ATI Radeon 9700 Pro but as this one is already a little bit outdated, I could also wait for what’s happening currently on the market or go with a 9800 Pro.

I’ll take the Creative Audigy soundcard from my old PC and give that one an older soundcard from my tools case. My old AMD then possibly turns into a fileserver or some other support station. The new tower case would finally offer space for my currently unplanted Aqua Computer watercooling which is neat!

… was a quote from Bill Gates from 1981 according to the book Computers – An Illustrated History from Christian Wurster which I had a sneak look into some days ago in a well sorted book shop and which her majesty now surprisingly presented me as a birthday gift.

This book covers the whole history of computers from the very beginning when they filled a whole hall and were based on relay’s to current computer high tech while leading though the chapters for scientific and military computers, mainframe computers, minicomputers, then microcomputers and to desktop computers.

It features a great amount of photo material and quotes from people who used the computers in their popular times.

I already love this book and think it should belong into the collection of everyone who dig old computer nostalgia.

Some readers on Amazon gave it a negative review and mentioned that there are incorrect facts in the book and that the pictures are of bad quality and showing jpg artefacts. Hell yea that might be true to some degree, I’ve found one flaw that says to a photo that the machine is a Atari 800 XL but actually it is a Atari 800 (I have to know! The Atari 600 XL was my first computer). And most of the photo material can’t be complained about.

This is truly decent computer porn for geeks and I’m sure the next big ‘electronic era’ that comes will be the era of the robots!

there is still no decent Dreamcast emulator to this day that i know of. only some that can frankly emulate some demos or 8bit style games. i found one emu named ‘nightmare‘ with that came a screenshot…. uh wait…. they updated …… several screenshots. according to them the only dc emu that can play commercial games yet. unfortunately it seems only to eat .GRE format ROM’s.