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December 2003: Paul Smith - Cooking your PC for Christmas.
Initially, you might think that a PC has little in common with a G reg. Vauxhall Nova, but you'd be wrong. Go to any Tesco car park on any Friday night and you'll see what a disposable income can do to a small innocuous hatchback. I'm talking about customisation; Neon, blacked-out windows and exhaust pipes you could smuggle asylum seekers into the country up. I'm talking about body kits, boom boxes and after-market bucket seats. What moonshine smuggling hillbillies started in the thirties with their Ford Model T's & A's is kept alive today by boys called Dean, with the help of Halfords and a big box of spanners.
After they've finished trying to do doughnuts and re-enacting scenes from 2 Fast 2 Furious they hand-brake (re)turn home to an adrenaline crash. The best way to unwind is to grab a sugary drink and hit the Super Highway in search of the sort of pert bottomed girls they failed to pull with their window rattling beats. But what's this? A plain beige PC won't do! Not when it can be pulled apart, neon'd up and turbo charged with a Perspex case. The kids call it Modding. See how the red LEDs on the CPU fan make a circular smear of light just like a cooking brake-disk! Make it a funky 64-bit 3.2Ghz Opteron or one of those new P4-extreme chips (with 2Mb cache, like a Xeon) and the performance will match the scorching looks. Overclocking a lesser machine is also all the rage, just so long you can stick a UV lamp in there too. Kids today, eh? They don't know they're born - a phrase that should have 'k-ching!' noises going off in your head.
Nextly, now that a DVD+R drive can be picked up for under £60 (The NEC ND1100a for example) you have no justification to not include one in your builds. A fancier DVD writer combo (+R & -R) drive from the likes of Lite-On will cost around £10-15 more. Add a tuner card and a dab of software and you have a hard-drive video recorder with the option of dumping the data onto a DVD afterwards. Crazily, there are still dealers not promoting this to the home video and camcorder market. I'm going to stick my neck out here a bit and say I'm expecting tape-less video cameras based on 2.5" notebook hard-drives (as opposed to the memory-card type you can buy at the moment) to be unveiled soon. 'When' they are, they'll be aimed at people with DVD writers (both PC and under-the-telly) to transfer the data to so that the drive can be blanked, ready to record 20-60Gb of video again. I've no proof to back-up my outrageous predictions, only my understanding of digital technology and a remote genealogical link to Mother Shipton. Mark well my words!
Lastly, I'd like to wish all readers of Indie Magazine a very profitable yet peaceful Christmas and an ecstatically industrious New Year. Mmmm. 2004 smells good!
Paul Smith is still 'resting'. Job offers to info@snapsandbytes.co.uk please
499 words Dale. I picked them all, especially for you. I even went to the trouble of making a new word up. I hope you appreciate my efforts! If not, I have a tale of Googlewhacking and personal media units to tell?
Paul