Today is Christmas and I have the time to finally post another entry in this blog. Although no one seems to ever read or comment on my blog posts I like to write my thoughts and post some of my camera photos here. This morning I used the Windows Live messenger app to start a video chat with my folks, who are on vacation down in Florida, near Disney World. The video quality was very sharp, but was blurry when moving my laptop camera around the room. It was good to see the game room there and say hi to my sister while Austin played a video game on his new Xbox 360. In my last post I mentioned shopping a computer store to build my next desktop computer. Well, I finally purchased the parts and then assembled a new Windows 7 desktop last month. I went with AMD this time, choosing the new "bulldozer" FX- 6100 processor, an ASUS M5A97 EVO board, 8 GB of DDR3 1600 RAM, and a 1 TB hard drive for storage. At first I wanted to get an SSD drive, but the cost and drive capacity were negative factors. The 1 TB is much more storage than my old 320 GB drive on the Vista desktop. Plus, the 1 TB is SATA 6, which is much faster than the old Vista drive interface. I even chose to get a water cooler, the H60 from corsair for the AMD cpu cooler. The board has great overclocking specs built in and I used a software app to overclock the cpu from 3.3 to 3.8 GHz speed. So far this new system is the fastest I have ever built, more geared for gaming then the old Vista desktop was. The video card is a Radeon HD 6850 with 1 GB and overclocked some. It is designed to handle the latest games, and I am currently playing both Skyrim for RPG type and Modern Warefare 3 as the FPS. The entire system build, including the cooler master case and the 600 watt power supply was not much over $1,000. Oh, another cool design of this build is that I added a side blue led fan to match the front blue led fan. Later I picked up a Gigaware 42 W 2.1 desktop speaker set that also has a blue led on the volume control knob. Sometimes I use a Gigaware headset for playing games without the speaker sound and it has a mic too for online chat. It is nice having a power user, performance desktop computer that I read about in magazines and on various review websites everyday. Besides the computer stuff, I've got a few other activities to mention in this blog post. The first would be going to see the annual Christmas play at church. Next, I got back into playing disc golf at some courses around and took a few pics. And, I found time to ride my bike on cold, late fall trails, but still captured some cool photos. I won't forget to mention spending good times with friends at some local restaurants, pool halls, and holiday meetups. On occasion, I had to drive down to the Fuquay-Varina area to repair a computer, and ended up stopping to eat and walk around a store. That's about it to post in this blog update. I've got some photos from December to post here with a brief description under each one:
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| Christmas tree at church after attending the Christmas play service. |
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| New Windows 7 desktop with blue led front fan. |
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| Side view of new desktop computer with blue led fan, Asus logo, and Win7 product key stickers(top right). |
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| Fiber optic Christmas tree setup with ornaments and red star (new). |
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| I great disc golf drive to within feet of a birdie. |
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| Manger scene with baby Jesus in center, my plants behind. |
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| Difficult hole #1 at a local disc golf course. |
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| Sunset on the lake: taken from a trail while riding my bike. |
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My Fiesta parked outside a shopping center in Holly Springs.
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