News: Fractal PC

It's been 8 years since my last PC build and the time has come for me to replace my aging Toshiba laptop. After much thought and price checks I settled for this:

CPU: Intel i3-2100
MB: Asus P8H67 rev3.0
RAM: 2x 4GB Corsair Vengeance Blue 1333MHz
GFX: XFX Radeon 6850 1GB
PSU: Corsair TX 650W V2
BOX: Fractal Design Arc

Got all of this (except the case) from a shop in Austria (www.e-tec.at) and the prices were very reasonable. The build worked out of the box and gave me no problems whatsoever which is a first!

Booting Linux from Compact Flash Pt.1

My first job was finding suitable hardware. I didn't want to sacrifice any of my existing setups so I decided to build a whole new computer based on Intel's Pentium III chip. The next step was chosing a suitable chipset. Since I wanted a system that would be as quiet as possible, I needed to passively cool the CPU with the help of Zalman CNPS-6000 copper heatsink. My other requirement was having at least 768MB of RAM. I actually had two Slot-1 440BX motherboards lying around and a number of DIMM modules sized 128MB and 256MB. Unfortunately both boards proved to be inadequate. If I went for Soyo 6BA-IV+ I would either have to buy 512MB modules or forget the passive cooling part as Zalman heatsink obstructed two DIMM slots out of four. Finally, after giving it lots of thought, I decided Via Apollo Pro 133T chipset was the way to go.

After several days of searching, I picked up a really cheap setup consisting of an Abit VH6T board, Pentium III 800MHz and three sticks of 512MB ECC RAM. This was to be my new platform.

- End of part 1 -

NBP: Intel PRO/Wireless 2011B

I recently purchased two Intel PRO/Wireless 2011B PCMCIA cards on eBay and recieved them the other day. Both look as good as new and even came with the manuals and CDs. What's best is that these cards are Plug and Play as far as the Netbook Pro is concerned. They also support 128-bit WEP and have no trouble connecting to an AP with a hidden SSID. I have yet to test them with the Jornada but my guess is it will probably require additional drivers. Compared to the Orinoco Gold, they stick out less and aren't as bulky. Signal strength appears to be about the same.