The "beast".

So I took my computer to work yesterday for maintenance(was really dusty) and repair. Now everything is working up to specifications. Had to get 2 hard drives and 1 power supply. The hard drives were on sale, 80Gb for $40 each. The power supply was a 480W Thermaltake for $10 on "my boss discount". So not only everything works flawlessly but it was upgraded a bit to some extent. Now I have 7 hard drives with over half a terabyte worth of storage, specifically 700 Gigabyte. I have more hard drives, but I just don't have more free ports to connect them. When I brought in my computer, a co-worker, pointing to my computer asks if that was my "beast". I guess, yeah, my computer is massive, I got a large full tower, yet inside the case its really cramped, there are 2 hard drive at the interior/bottom, because there are no more free bays. Now, my boss just calls my computer the "file server". I guess he is right, since I got so much data storage capacity and so many hard drives. Another co-worker told me to just assemble another computer for the hard drives.

The reason for all these hard drives for me are pretty simple. I want a dedicated hard drive for Windows, program files, and large movies and pictures. For that I put 2 sata hard drive on raid 0 working as a single drive for performance. Then one hard drive is for games, another is for windows page file(virtual memory), one for internet downloads, one for image/ghost/back up, and one for spare unsorted data. Reason being, having dedicated HD for certain task performs faster.

I'm thinking sometime soon on converting my computer to a Media Center, I already got the remote controller and Windows Media Center 2005.

Back when I was in Theodosia with Dana, I took a bunch of test shots in hope of making a huge composite picture. Well I just done that. The uncompressed composite picture is 450 Megabytes, on JPG compression it's 74 Megabytes. I used 17 five megapixel photos. The resolution is 26005x6515(That's right, your average desktop resolution is 1280x1024.) The composite picture did not come out good, because I had no tripod and no idea about lighting, back then. But at least now I know what to do next time to get better pictures for a large composite photo.

I'll post a resized snapshot of it here just so you can get an idea, but its useless if its resized to normal desktop resolution. Plus there is not way for me to upload a 74 Megabytes photo.

Behave kids.

Theodosia, September 2004