wade womersley leeds based web developer

Recently I decided to finally upgrade from my AMD Athlon X2 6000+ to a shiny new AMD Phenom II X6 965. Being AMD, that meant I didn’t have to change my motherboard, nor did I have to change my memory. Their Phenom II range is designed for AM3 but works in AM2+ motherboards; that means it will work with DD2 and DDR3 memory and also shares the same socket design – thank you AMD!

The new processor cost me £144 in total, with free next day shipping (incidentally, eBuyer are incredible sometimes, I ordered it at 22:10 and it arrived at 09:00 the next day, no shipping charges at all!)

So, the Phenom II 965 is designated a 3.4GHz processor, quad core. But the “Black Edition” part of the name means it is multiplier unlocked – i.e. it’s really really easy to overclock the CPU. I do love overclocking, it just feels like you’re getting a little bit more for a cheaper price. After hopping into my BIOS and changing the CPU multiplier to 19, I restarted, got into Windows, loaded up CPUz64 and was welcomed by the image to the right, yes, 3.8GHz. That’s 400MHz extra and all I did was change one value from Auto to 19.0: I didn’t have to increase the voltage or muck around with multiplier x bus-speed mathematics: and it’s completely stable!

In summary, if you’re looking for an upgrade in the near future that will really do well, consider the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, it’s always over £100 less than an Intel equivalent and will perform superbly for the price.

Now if only I could find a game I enjoyed enough that would really take advantage of this, 8GB ram and a GTX 265!

We’ve all seen the movies where interactive displays are done on transparent glass, well Samsung, using OLED (organic light emitting diodes) have finally created one for us all to gawp over. Details are scarce, but it shows that yet another sci-fi idea is becoming mainstream reality. For now, here’s a video of the display, courtesy of Engadget.

A few months ago at work we realised the need for lots of “nodes” (servers) in the UK and in the US initially. We have a lot of data processing that we need to do and we worked out it would be faster and cheaper if we could distribute the work over lots of servers rather than a few beefy servers. Dan started looking around and found VPS.net, they looked good so we thought we’d give them a go. Of course we didn’t want to “put all our eggs in one basket” so we took out some VPS servers with different companies too. A few months later, the only servers we’ve been continuously happy with are the VPS.net servers.

There pricing is one of their best features, you can get a “single node” VPS with some basic specs of 400Mhz processor, 256MB RAM, 10GB storage and 250GB bandwidth (what this site is running on currently) for £15 a month. £15 may seem a little steep to some people to start with but when you realise this is for your own root access Virtual Server (i.e. you can pretty much do anything you want with it like it was at home) it isn’t that bad at all! What makes it better though is, as you buy more nodes, the price comes down for each additional node, so the first node may be £15, but the second is only £14 and so on all the way down to £9 per node.

VPS.net‘s idea of nodes is also very cool. You can buy up to 16 nodes that work as one VPS, and you can change this at any time. Lets say you were me with one node and suddenly you got a surge of visitors and it just couldn’t handle the load anymore, not a problem, simply buy an extra node, attach it to the VPS and you’ll immediately get the benefit of it, no need to re-install your VPS or anything!

They also have automated full node backups for £4 a month too, they take a daily, weekly and monthly backup that you can restore from at any time, so if you totally screw up your server, just hit yesterday’s backup and voila! Back to normal again. Not only that, if the actual server your VPS is on decides it’s time to die, they’ll boot your VPS up on another server within minutes, that doesn’t cost and is part of the service.

If your demands are for a webserver, they have free DNS management tools as well so you don’t have to use an external service, just point your domain at their nameservers.

So in summary, if you’re looking for a reliable, fast, cheap place to host a website or host nodes to perform data analysis, I’d certainly give VPS.net a go.

Review ends

For all you people wishing you were at Hogwarts, here’s the first step in the right direction (no actual magic, but I guarantee for people who don’t know about this product, they’ll stare at you in amazement, or maybe fear). It’s called the Kymera Magic Wand.

The Kymera magic wand is actually a universal remote control that can learn IR signals to control pretty much any IR controlled device (TV, Sky, DVD player, BR player etc.)

Motions such as flicking the wand up can change the channel, rotating the wand can increase the volume and so on.

The website is just as cheesy as the wand, a flash movie that looks like a spell book, but that is the target market they’re aiming for.

Coming in at £50 it’s not too badly priced considering the geek factor involved, but maybe it’s too high a price to pay when your mates come over and promptly leave when you whip out your wand?

Finally upgraded to a GTX 260 896MB graphics card so I’m getting rid of my old card, it’s a Geforce 8800 GTS, with 640MB RAM and a clock speed set to 575Mhz (overclocked.) And yes, it can run Crysis! (Not at max details of course, but at 1680×1050 with settings at a mix of High/Very High)

Buy the ASUS Geforce EN 8800 GTS on ebay.

Next time you have a problem booting your PC, why not give this simple flow chart a go? It’s actually easier to use than it first looks, it just covers a lot of stuff.

The full thing can be found at fonerbooks.