The 411

By on February 3rd, 2012 / No Comments »

Geek Girl

Here’s my new business card and I’m loving it! Give me a call or shoot me an email if you are in need of the maestro of all things tech. :]

Sincerely yours,

Cara Reynolds, IT Phenomenon

 

Filed under: Computers - Tags: , , , , ,

My New Machine

By on April 13th, 2010 / No Comments »

It has taken me a bit of time to get all the pieces together to build a new, super computer I like to call, “The Machine”, but now that she is finally done she is amazing. I put this entry together to give people an idea of what I can do and an amazing formula to have a great entertainment, design and/or gaming computer at a reasonable price.

First off, it took a while to sit down and figure what would be the best components to build the best PC at a semi reasonable price. I think I succeed. I used an old X Blade gaming case I had and built and wired all the rest inside her. I had some problems, like the motherboard never recognizing the video card, so I could not tell whether the system was really booting or not. I tested a million different variables and even ended up returning my super fresh RAM I thought was incompatible, with some OCZ Platinum RAM you can see below. None of these things ended up being the issue, but I needed to be sure and I learned a lot in the process. What did end up being the problem was the Biostar motherboard. It was fried, but Newegg replaced it, just took some time for them to get the return and send me a new one.

It was a great deal of work building her, all the tweaks, cut hands and fingers, but definitely worth it. I enjoy that I still have some hardware and software tweaks to do to get to optimal. It is insane how fast it works and how great the picture is on the HD TV. Also, when I run Adobe Master Collection C3 it is beyond fast. I am using Open Office on Windows 7 just to see what I think of this new Operating System. FYI, I will most likely change it over to Ubuntu once I am done testing it out.

Below are the names and photos of the parts I bought or already had and used to build “The Machine”.

BIOSTAR TPOWER i55 LGA 1156 Intel P55 ATX Intel Motherboard

OCZ Platinum 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)

LG WH10LS30K 10X Blu-ray Burner

EVGA 01G-P3-N988-TR GeForce 9800 GT HDMI 1GB 256-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

ZEROtherm CORE92 Socket 1156/1366 HDT Cooler

HT OMEGA STRIKER 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Card

Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive

Antec EarthWatts EA650 650W Continuous Power ATX12V Ver.2.2 / EPS12V version 2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC “compatible with Core i7/Core i5” Power Supply

X-Blade 10-Bay Aluminum Mid ATX Gaming Case

…and a million LED fans I put all over the case and motherboard to cool this beast down.

For all those still awake!!! : D Here are the pictures of the computer on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mushpamensa/sets/72157642277091665/

I also offer my services to build computers for others. If you want to learn more about it go here, www.mysweetgeek.com.

I hope you have enjoyed my super nerdy computer talk blog as much as I enjoyed building the computer and talking about said computer.

– Cara Reynolds, IT Phenomenon

Filed under: Computer Repair, Computers, Small Business - Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,