Since I got my new PC now, I’m not going to neglect my of PC that has already served me for almost 5 years now. I’m thinking of putting this PC in the living room, for public use if I got guests at my home. The original 17-inch CRT monitor that originally came with this PC is no longer practical to use. It’s really huge.

With the price of LCD monitor getting really cheap now, just decided to get a new LCD monitor for my old PC. I get this 19″ LG LCD monitor. And the unboxing process.

And the monitor with the stand attached together.

The new monitor with my current Acer 22″ monitor.

All are set. My old computer with new LCD monitor.

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The problem when I’m getting something new, I want everything to be new. So went to Low Yatt Plaza again after work today. I want new keyboard for my new PC. And of course, it has to be wireless. I will put my old PC at my living room, and the old wireless keyboard and mouse will go with it.

But when you’re there, there’s so much other things that pop up in my mind to buy. Next is DVDROM. I used existing DVD Writer before, but I still want something new. So I just bought new DVDROM. Also, the chasis fan that comes with the casing is just a normal fan without the speed sensor. So I get one that can report the fan speed to the computer. At the end, here is my shopping list today.

Thinking of getting Microsoft Wireless keyboard, but there’s non that attracts me. At the end, I get Logitech Cordless Desktop MX3200 Laser.

These are the contents of the box.

Remember how messy the cables are in my previous entry?

After being through of headache for a while dealing with the spagetthi of cables, here how the cables look now. I guess that’s a bit better than before.

Actually there’s another thing that is not the first photo of this entry of things that I bought this time. It’s a new 320GB SATA harddisk. Well, I use the existing harddisk for my new PC for intalling operating system (the other 2 500GB I use for file storage). But that harddisk is quite slow that it lowers the base score of my new PC’s Windows Experience Index.

This is my new PC’s Windows Experience Index score after I put the new harddisk. Every single element is with 5.9 score, the maximum that you can get.

It seems that my new PC is fit to run Vista smoothly.

Read the rest of the stories relating to my new PC

1. My New PC I
2. My New PC II
3. My New PC III
4. My New PC IV
5. My New PC V
6. My New PC VI

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I went to the first PC Fair for 2009 last Friday with quite a big hope actually. After a long thought, I decided to upgrade my PC. But I’m rather dissapointed to see that not much booths selling computer parts for building a system, like the last one last year. So on Sunday, I just decided to go to Low Yatt for shopping.

And here are what I shopped that day:

• Gigabyte GA-EP43-UD3L motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 45nm processor
• Gigabyte GV-R485OC-1GH graphics accelerator
• Cooler Master eXtreme Power Plus 650W power supply unit
• Cooler Master Thermal Interface Material
• Power Logic Azzura 2000 chassis
• LG Internal Super Multi DVD Rewriter
• 2 x CorSair CM2X2048-6400C5 G 2GB DDR2 memory

Wow! There’s a lot of unboxing that I can do this time.

The very first thing that you need to have a thorough thinking when building a computer system is what motherboard that you want to get. I plan to built a gaming PC, so I guess this would be a good choice.

These are the contents of the box.

And another important decision is, what type of graphic card that you want to get. The game nowadays really requires a powerful graphic card. And it’s quite pricey too to get a good quality graphic card. This is what I get.

These are the contents of the box.

And the longest time taken decision that I have to make that day was to decide, what type of chassis to use. The bigger the casing, the more expensive. But not much that catch my eye. Was planning to get Cooler Master, but just a bit more expensive than what I expect to pay. At the end, I settle for this one.

The chassis out of the box.

The chassis out of the wrapper. I quite like the green treatment that it has. Looks like a green PC. LOL.

Let’s peek inside the chassis. Here’s the cover is opened. Well not bad. It has screwless CDROM and HDD bay. But I wish the slots for PCI cards are screwless too. But can’t expect much for chassis on this price. One thing that I notice that there’s this thing like an air duct at the chassis’s cover. It’s kinda look cool.

But after I do more readings about this, this is actually a Thermally Advantaged chassis design produced by Intel. The processor nowadays produces a lot of heat, and this design is focused to lower the processor thermal environment temperature. I guess the 2 chassis fans will help in generating the following airflow. More about this here.

The chassis that I got comes with power supply unit already. I wish that it doesn’t come with PSU as I’m thinking of buying that separately. I ask the guy there whether I can trade in the PSU? He said that it’s possible, and the price of chassis will be less RM10. Hell no. It’s better I’m keeping the PSU.

Why getting separate PSU where the chassis comes with one already? First, the supplied CPU can provide only 250W pure/real power. But I will having power hunger graphic cards in, 1 DVDROM, 1 DVD Rewritter, 3 harddisks and 2 chassis fan inside which requires more power.

The other thing is the connectors. Only 1 SATA connector, but all of my harddisk are SATA one. It looks ugly to use SATA power converter, plus it added the length to the power cable making it harder to do cable management later on.

So I bought this Cooler Master 650W power supply unit.

These are the contents of the box.

The power supply unit out of the wrapper.

I guess before continuing, let’s do something to the PSU first shall we? I take out the original PSU that comes with the chassis. The original PSU and the PSU that I bought next to each other.

Now the Cooler Master PSU is assembled to the chassis already. Sweet. Its black color looks very classy.

And finally, the processor. I’ve been using a few PCs already with Core 2 Duo processor at office. I really want to see how fast can Core 2 Quad do. Well, I bought the entry level Core 2 Quad processor.

These are the contents of the box.

Let’s get the PC building process started. First of all, I need to assemble the motherboard to the chassis. Colors always fascinated me. The color coded connectors really look cool.

And the back connectors of the motherboard. 8 USB ports (wow), 7.1 audio, HD audio, gigabit internet.

While the motherboard is still out, let’s assemble the most delicate component first – the processor. I’m so paranoid that I keep grounding my self (touching the metal part of the chassis) when doing this just to avoid any static charge.

And the scariest part is to assemble the cooling unit fan. Oh my. A big force has to be given to make the fan stick to the motherboard. Well finally, the processor and cooling unit has been assembled.

Let’s cut the chase ok. There are so many PC assembly guide out there that you can Google (actually, I’m getting lazy to take photos already that time. LOL). Basically after that I slot in the RAM, screw the motherboard to the chassis, slot in my 3 harddisk, slot in the DVD Rewriter, and wire them all.

Talking about DVDROM / DVD Rewriter, have you been in the situation where you need to choose whether you want to get the gray version of the black version to follow the colour of your chassis? Well nowadays, both colors are in the package. You can actually change the front panel of whether you want it to be gray or black. That’s cool.

Finally, it’s time to slot in the most expensive component that I bought for my new PC – the graphic card.

Well, everything is in place now. Don’t mind the cables for now as I need to spend another hour tidying that. I will do that at other day as that’s quite a headache process too.

It’s the moment of truth. It’s time to power up my new PC, and see if it’s boot up or not. Yes! My new PC boot up with the speaking giving 1 short beep, signaling that everything is OK.

Let’s get into the BIOS. Nice. Both of my DVDROMs are detected, and all 3 of my harddisk are detected as well.

The PC Health. The system temperature and CPU temperature seems fine.

And this is where I need to go for overclocking. I will definately visit this page in the future when I have more confident doing overclocking.

So what’s next – time to install Windows Vista. I’m sensing Pirates on The Caribbean are around – if you know what I mean ;)

Read the rest of the stories relating to my new PC

1. My New PC I
2. My New PC II
3. My New PC III
4. My New PC IV
5. My New PC V
6. My New PC VI

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Just feels like yesterday that I do this exercise – calculated my hard earning money, and being in misery seeing my hard earning money has to be given back to government.

Well, I’m using e-Filing again this year, which LHDN makes it so easy for you to assessment. Since no big thing happened in my life (I’m still single with no kids), the process of filling the form is pretty much the same as what I have been doing for the past 5 years. I wonder how time consuming this will be for those with spouse and kids making sure that all the assessment is done correctly, or else you may end up having being taxed on the income that are not taxable.

Damn it! I have a balance of tax to pay this year, and the amount is not small – RM385. There goes additional RM385 out of my pocket from my next coming salary.

Well, the due date for this is 30th April 2009. Have you submitted your tax form?

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My oh my. I’m quite suprised getting to know that my blog is selected as the finalist for yoyooh.com Blogger Award. Thanks to farridhusin who left me a message about this on TagMe!

Well, I never actually blog about this yoyooh.com Blog Award. How selfish I am. But please pardon me. Nowadays, it seems very hard for me to keep updating blog.

Anyway, thanks to those who nominated my blog for this award, and those who keep voting that makes me to the final. And the final vote is on. Just go to the below link, and vote for the blog that you think is worth for the award.

yoyooh.com Blogger Award Final Voting

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I officially terminated my Maxis Broadband on 7th February 2009. Actually, I was visiting Maxis Center way earlier than that to terminate my Maxis Broadband account, but the Maxis stuff there suggested that I suspend my account for 2 months, then come back again in January 2009, and I will have RM200 termination fee waived since I’m using Maxis Broadband for 12 months. You can read about it here.

I though my business with Maxis Broadband is over, but it seems that Maxis Broadband doesn’t want to let me go easily. End of February 2009, I received this bill from Maxis Broadband with the amount of RM200. I just like – hey, what the heck.

Looking at the details, the RM200 is for handing fee of discontinuation of service.

But on the day that I close Maxis Broadband, it clearly stated on the form that the my account termination is done after 1 year. And they said RM200 is waived, and on that day, I only need to pay the last bill for this.

So I guess this has to be the glitches in the system where my account termination has’t been updated yet?

But again, end of March 2009 ago, I still receive the bill from Maxis Broadband. This is too much.

So went to visit Maxis Centre KLCC today to ask, what is going on really? So the counter guy took all the forms that I got from account termination last time, and went to see his officer I guess. After a while, he came back and told me that – the reason why RM200 is still charged is because I suspended my account for 2 months. Therefore, I’m not using Maxis Broadband for 12 months.

There you see. I guess they just make that up on that instant. I told them, the reason that I suspended my account is because the Maxis staff suggested this. Come on. How on earth that I can suspend my account with Maxis staff doing it. And if they are able to do is, it simply means that this is legitimate. I’m not going to pay that RM200.

So the counter guy told me that I can ignore the bill for now, and he will call me back once they settle this. I’m really hoping for a good news. And if they still insisted that I pay RM200, then it means I have another visit to make to Maxis Centre KLCC.

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Happy Birthday Gmail! It turns 5 already, and that means, I’ve been using Gmail for almost 5 years too. To my suprise, after digging my archive, I still have the very first welcome email that I receive on my account, which was on October 14, 2004.

Why I still have this? That time, Gmail was the only email service that offers big mailbox size, and one of the tagline that I read that time was – why delete your email where you have more than enough space to store them all? Searching email is faster too, so you can archive as many as email that you want. So that’s it. With that, it’s very seldom that I delete any email from my Gmail account. If you don’t want to see any of the email in you inbox, just archive it.

Well, I was 6 months late to use Gmail from the day that it first launched. But at that early stage of Gmail, account creation is by invitation only. I’ve been searching high and low find people that can invite me to create an account, and finally, one of my ex-university mate from London sent me an invitation.

Yay! Feels quite good actually to be amongst the early people to use Gmail, and seeing every transformation that Gmail has gone until the maturity state that it’s at now.

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I was browsing and reading my twitter page earlier today, where I quite shock to see one entry made by my company’s twitter which has reference to me. At first I thought I see it wrong. But after I click the link – yes, the photo at that link was indeed taken by me when I published this entry.

Come to think of it, it’s quite scary to think that more people at work know the existence of my blog.

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