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PostPosted: Mon Mar 01, 2010 11:24 am 
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My eye has been on UPSs ever since I was working on a Sinclair Zx Spectrum, all those years ago, on a programming session that had lasted for several hours, and a friend disconnected the wrong plug from the wall. In those days you saved to tape, which took at least 5 minutes, and therefore did not save often.

I've never forgotten what I felt when all those hours of work went up in a cloud of electrons. :D

UPSs have saved my bacon more than once. Although seldom put into action, when they do intervene they are worth their weight in gold.

I only use APC units, which, so far, have never let me down. Although more expensive, I also prefer the Smart-UPS kind, with its true sine wave output when on battery power, than the sampled sine wave output of the Back-UPSs.

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PostPosted: Mon Mar 01, 2010 7:02 pm 
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Location: Durham, England
Sinclair Spectrum! :shock: You were spoilt Jorge, I could only afford the ZX-81 :cry: . In fact I still have it in a box somewhere along with the additional memory pack, all 16k of it.

I agree about the APC units, they are worth the extra cost. I have a couple here. I like the fact they are in a nice steel case, rather than the plastic offerings from Belkin etc.


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PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2010 3:32 pm 
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A few more photos. Here you can see a new theme I've also been working on (a port of Sofonias Windows 7 theme for NextSTART, with an excellent wallpaper from Shaun).

Thanks to some new features I added to WorkShelf, the needles of the Net and CPU gauges you can see on the rightmost monitor smoothly move to their new positions now (instead of just jumping there).

All good stuff! :D

Image

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Here you can also see what the office looked like before the arrival of the new system (and the HP monitor):

Image

At the bottom right corner you can see the 1000VA APC Smart UPS (exactly half the vertical size of the new 2200VA UPS).

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2010 4:19 pm 
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gjbth wrote:
Sinclair Spectrum! :shock: You were spoilt Jorge, I could only afford the ZX-81 :cry: . In fact I still have it in a box somewhere along with the additional memory pack, all 16k of it.


Ah! My very first Spectrum was a gift from a friend when I was about 15. He and his family were my neighbours and he saw me everyday in the coffee shop programming on paper because I didn't have a computer back then. I would then hitchike back and forth during lunch hour to a computer shop in a village close by just so I could type my work into a Spectrum and test it.

After seeing me doing this for a couple of months, he asked me what I was doing. When he found out I didn't have a computer he lended me his Zx Spectrum (which he wasn't using) and a couple of months later ended up giving it to me as a birthday present.

I was very fortunate to have had people in my life who believed in me when I was a kid, and who helped me live my dream of working with computers. :D

I trully love what I do.

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2010 5:36 pm 
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Quote:
I trully love what I do.


Thats evident in the quality of your work :D


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PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2010 7:29 pm 
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Damn, you got the same mice on the stand (the left one) as my parents.... :p
Cable management, I haven't done anything like that either here aside of neating it up a bit on the desktop itself...


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 Post subject: Re: New system arrived: 3 X25-M SSDs RAID 0 benchmark inside
PostPosted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 11:46 am 
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I currently have 2 velociraptors in RAID 0 with a Pentium4 chip + GeForce 7950 GT + 2 MB RAM. You would be amazed at how well this system performs. I am happy with this system but it is now 5 years old and I am kind of waiting for something drastic to fail. Since I have everything critical backed up on an external drive, I could install what I would need on my wife's laptop if my system fails & I need to order a new system.

I look forward to a new chip + SSD ( 2x80 GB in RAID 0) + Windows 7. How are your SSDs performing? What are the conditions for which I would consider a 64 bit system?


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 Post subject: Re: New system arrived: 3 X25-M SSDs RAID 0 benchmark inside
PostPosted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 4:00 pm 
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My advice is for you to get *both*.

My SSDs are no longer state-of-the-art, but even a single SSD will beat your Velociraptors in RAID 0 any day because of access time alone (there are no read heads to move). I know from experience, I have another system here with Velociraptors in it.

As for 64 bit systems, they are the norm for people running Windows 7 these days. There is absolutely no reason against choosing a 64 bit version of Windows, and you'll be able to use more than 4 GB of RAM.

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