Tag Archive for 'computers'

Home Theater PC

Published at May 25, 2009 in Technology. 0 Comments

I’ve been thinking about building a home theater pc to watch movies on the big screen and today I finally ordered the goods.

SILVERSTONE Silver Aluminum front panel, 1.0mm SECC body LC03S-V ATX Media Center / HTPC Case

GIGABYTE GA-MA770-UD3 AM2+/AM2 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-MA770-UD3 AM2+/AM2 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard

GIGABYTE GV-R455D3-512I Radeon HD 4550 512MB 64-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card
Fanless Passive Screen Cooling

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1800 MCE Kit 1128 PCI-Express x1 Interface

Tuniq Potency PSU-POT550-BK 550W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply

AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 45W Dual-Core Processor

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory

Western Digital Caviar Black WD5001AALS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive

Pioneer Black 20X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 12X DVD+R DL 20X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 40X CD-R 32X CD-RW 2MB Cache SATA CD/DVD Burner


My favorite gadget from CES

Published at January 24, 2009 in Technology. 0 Comments
HP Mini 1000 Mi

HP Mini 1000 Mi

I love the HP Mini 1000 Mi because:

  • 10.2 inch wide screen + webcam
  • Great keyboard (almost full size)
  • Intel 270 processor
  • 2GB RAM
  • Solid State hard drive
  • 2.3 lbs.
  • less than 1 inch thick
  • It’s preloaded with Linux!

my first computer

Published at August 13, 2008 in Life. 0 Comments

Glendale GalleriasI was recently trying to think back to my first computer; I remember that I lived in Los Angeles at the time and my grandma would sometimes take me to the Glendale Gallerias. If you don’t know about the Glendale Gallerias, just picture a huge fancy mall. They had a Radio Shack and every time we walked by it, I would plead and beg obsessively to my grandma to please buy me a computer; which I’m sure didn’t sound pretty.

I had pleaded so many times to her and somehow one day it worked and she agreed to buy me one of the least expensive models. I was thrilled! I had never used a computer before and didn’t even know what they were used for; the only thing I knew was that I had to have one. It was the summer of 1985. I was 13 and had only been in this country for 2 years.

Tandy Color 2

Back in those days, Radio Shack carried Tandy computers; I don’t remember the exact model I had now, but I suspect it was the Tandy Color Computer 2. In many ways, this was the beginning of life in America for me as I began to take part in the PC phenomenon.

As I recall, one of my fondest memories with this computer was that it had the ability to produce sounds. The computer manual provided some examples to get you going using BASIC programming language.

BASICOne of the drawbacks of my Tandy computer was that it had a very limited amount of memory. I remember this very vividly because I wasn’t able to save any of the music programs that I wrote, which would sometimes take hours to complete. I would have to start from scratch each time I used the computer.

Cassette This wasn’t the best solution, but at least I had a computer to experiment with and I believe it made me a better typist. A year or so later I discovered that I could plug a tape recorder to my Tandy computer and save my programs to a cassette. If you remember cassettes, the cool thing about them was that you could record over the same cassette many times. It didn’t take me long to save up my money and buy the tape recorder from Radio Shack. That tape recorder changed things drastically because I could start writing something half-way, save it and come back to it another day.  Back then this was a huge improvement!

How about you? I’m interested to hear about your first computer story in the comments section. How old were you when you got your first computer? What type of computer did you have?