Well, yesterday I headed down to LY Plaza to my favorite IT retailer for a bunch of parts. I was aiming to wait till end September to get this upgrade but an unexpected disaster happened. Anyways, so, here goes upgrade phase one. Phase two is smaller and is not so obvious. If you noticed I have two Intel Core 2 CPU boxes in the photo. The one below is a Quad-core CPU which will be going into my main workstation but not exactly so soon. Why wait? I've two weddings to process so that takes priority and I need to stabilize the other workstation first. Choice of parts is nothing extraordinary. Just reliable parts to get the job done. After all, tech refresh is every 18 months anyway

Bunch of new parts ready to be assembled!

New architectural marvel or just a simple heat sink?

64-bit Vista install...

Normally, I'd never ever buy a fully built PC for myself (or wife) from anybody - HP, Acer, Apple, Dell, you know. This is probably the second PC I can consider getting other than this HP TouchSmart model that looks quite snazzy. The XPS One doesn't count because it's not available in Malaysia yet. What's not to like? Price is one thing but why can't Dell Malaysia remove all the useless stuff (monitor, speakers, keyboard, mouse) because I've got better and sell just the unit? Secondly, it maxes out at 4Gb RAM. Come on, this is 2008, we need 6Gb and 8Gb! Anyways, pricewise, it gets pretty high (I spec'ed mine up to RM4,968 with a 2.5Ghz CPU) so again, I have to pass on it. However, it looks like Dell's waking up a bit and PC manufacturers are begin to make snazzier boxes. The new Latitude E-Series looks good

Lots of flash and demos. Nothing really new though and the real launch is still weeks away...

Interestingly, I found a landscape wallpaper that looks oriental... Click on it to see the larger image!

Vista is proving to be pretty decent on the desktop, at least with build 5472... at least it's much better to look at than Windows XP. I think it's growing on me a bit. Click to see more Vista screenies.


Continue reading "Vista Desktop" »

Well, Lightroom is pretty quick on my aging PC. Nothing to really shout about of course but runs fine. Still not used to the interface but should come to grips with it soon enough. Found out that if you want to move Lightroom's default cache folder (which happens to be in /my documents/my pictures), you can just close lightroom, move the folder to wherever you want, then restart lightroom. It will complain that it can't find it's library so select Use existing library and point it to where you've moved your library folder earlier. Beta-oddness I guess.

Finally! After teasing us for a while, Adobe puts out Lightroom Beta 3 for the rest of the world!


Performance wise on my 2Gb RAM, P-M 1.8Ghz notey is ok, nothing spectacular but it's beta so performance is bound to improve later. That said, I think a home PC upgrade should be soon!