Six months after installing the Rosewill PSU it crapped out on me. It sparked and popped and
quit just like that. I don't think my system is putting a lot of demand on this power supply,
and I was not doing anything that required a lot of CPU power when it quit, so I think it was
just a bad PSU. But this does make me a bit skeptical of Rosewill power supplies. Thankfully it
was covered by a one year warranty from Newegg so it was replaced right away, and all I had to
pay was shipping. It was replaced with the same model PSU from Rosewill, so now I'm wondering
if I'm just going to have the same problem in another six months. If the second unit fails I
will definitely be buying a different brand. The Rosewill PSU was only about $40, so this makes
me think that this could be a good example of getting what you pay for. Maybe it was cheap for
a reason.

At some point very soon I will need to add another HDD. The two internal and one external are
just about full, and by the time I back everything up to DVDR's I will have spent as much on
blank discs as I would have on a new hard drive. The only drawback to adding another internal
hard drive is the demand it will put on my PSU. And given the fact that the first PSU failed
I'm not sure I want to take a chance. If the replacement PSU fails and I get the opportunity to
upgrade to a better brand at a higher wattage then I may go ahead and get a third internal hard
drive. Otherwise I may just end up getting a second external drive, and if I do that I will get
one with an eSATA connection to take advantage of the higher speed of a SATA connection and the
second SATA port on my motherboard.

Of course, the ideal solution would be a 2 TB external HDD unit, or better yet a NAS media
server, but that costs as much as my PC! One can always dream though.

I've been on a mission for quite some time now to try and figure out how to save my DVD movies to my hard drive so I can use my PC as a media center. After much Googling, reading different forums, and trial and error I have finally figured out a way to do it without taking up a huge amount of space on my hard drive.

A few months ago I installed a second hard drive specifically for the purpose of storing music and video files. It's only a 250 GB drive, which unfortunately was all I could afford at the time, but so far it's working out quite well. I partitioned the drive into two separate drives to have one for music and the other for video, just to make things easier to organize.

Ripping and saving a standard DVD to a hard drive would consume way too much space. Most DVD movies use roughly about 4 to 8 GB of space on a disc, so saving a movie to your hard drive straight from the disc would be impractical. Even with 1 TB of storage you would quickly run out of space if you have a large movie collection, which I do. Not to mention that there is often quite a bit on a DVD that is nothing but previews, commentary, and extras that you're probably not going to want to watch as much as the movie itself. In order to make the most efficient use of space I encode the movie into the Xvid format. Xvid is an mpeg4 AVI format similar to Divx, but it's an open source format so there is no proprietary video player or sales pitch to sucker you into buying an upgrade or "pro" version of something. The only thing you need to play Xvid encoded videos on your PC is the Xvid codec, which is free.

After installing the Xvid codec you will then need two programs to rip and encode your movie as an Xvid movie file. The first one is pgc.NET. This program will scan the DVD in your drive for the main movie file, audio tracks, and subtitles and save them to the folder you specify as a VOB file. The process can take anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes, depending on your drive and the length of the movie. It's a simple process and the program is very straightforward and easy to use. The only things you need to select in pgc.NET are the drive where the DVD is located, and where you want to save your movie.

After you've extracted your movie you will then need the second program, avi.NET. What avi.NET does is compress the VOB file into one of two mpeg4 codecs you can choose from. You can select either the Divx or Xvid codec. I choose Xvid because it's an open source format, and if you burn it to a disc it will play on any device that can play Divx files. This is great for making back up copies of your movies when all you really want to see is the movie itself. It's also very convenient for making copies of the movies you own to take with you when you travel, rather then take the original DVD with you and risk damaging it. I have a portable Panasonic DVD player that works great with all the Xvid discs I've burned. Plus I can fit several movies on one DVD. And this is a lifesaver if you travel with kids!

Once you choose a format you then need to decide how much you want to compress the movie, and what type of audio track to use. You can take a 7 GB movie and compress it down to about 700 MB, perfect for a CD. Or choose to make the file a little bigger to retain better quality. You can also choose to keep an AC3 surround sound audio track, or convert it to 2 channel mp3. There are several options available in avi.NET to choose from when you want to compress your VOB file, but nothing overly technical. You may have to try it a couple of times to see which settings work best for you, but it's fairly easy to figure out. Once you have it set and you start the conversion it can take a few hours to complete the process, so I've found that it's best to let the program run overnight or when you won't need you computer for a while.

I've converted several mpg and VOB files so far and haven't had one problem with these programs. And I now have a nice selection of the movies I own on my PC so I can watch them whenever I want, and without taking up a huge amount of hard drive space. I use Windows Media Player 11 to play the movies and maintain a library of the movies stored on my PC with no problems at all. If you looking for an alternative to WMP try VLC media player, it supports several different formats and does an equally nice job of playing movies, and its free.

The Compaqtor started out as just another plain old Compaq PC. It was refurbished and fairly minimally equipped with just enough components to cover the basic home user's needs. Unfortunately, this was all I could afford at the time, so it would have to do. And at $350 I couldn't really complain. After researching the specs on several different PC's in this price range I decided to get this one because it had a pretty solid foundation to build upon, and I was definitely planning on expanding it's capability.



It came out of the box with an ASUS A8N-LA mobo with an Athlon 64 3400+ 2.2 Ghz processor socket 939, 1 GB RAM, Samsung 160 GB HDD, Lite-On DVD(+/-)R/RW Lightscribe drive, a 350 watt PSU, and Windows XP Home. Not exactly a screamer in the performance department, but good enough to start with. Especially considering that I was upgrading from a four year old Dell laptop with a Pentium 4 1.4 Ghz CPU, a 30 GB hard drive, and one of the most buggy versions of Windows XP I've ever had the displeasure of using.

Being the media junkie that I am, it didn't take long for me to fill up the hard drive. Let's face it, a 160 GB HDD isn't very much storage nowadays, so an additional HDD was definitely in order. After about six months of saving up some cash it was time for the first round of upgrades. These upgrades consisted of adding two sticks of 512 MB RAM to bump up the total RAM to 2 GB, an Hitachi 250 GB SATA HDD, a Sapphire ATI Radeon X1050 graphics card, an additional case fan, and a Rosewill 450 watt PSU. All for about $200 from Newegg.

The original hard drive was also replaced after about a month and a half. It started generating imminent failure alerts after one month of use. It was replaced under warranty, which was good, but unfortunately it had to be replaced with a drive of the same capacity, 160 GB. But at least HP sent me a better drive, an Hitachi. After one year of use it's still going strong.



As you can see in the above photo, it got quite cramped inside the Compaq after installing all these additional components. The Compaq case was a bit on the small side for a mid tower, so I installed the additional case fan on the front to help pull some air in. This was only a marginal improvement in cooling though, because the case wasn't designed for an additional fan in front. In fact, the case wasn't even designed for an additional HDD even though the motherboard was. I did manage to squeeze the second hard drive into a 3.5" front bay slot so I could mount it somewhere. This was a good solid mounting location, but extremely bad for cooling a hard drive as there was absolutely no air circulating in this area of the case. There wasn't even much room for me to get my hands in the case to connect some of the cables, so I knew this machine had to be running a little hotter then it should be. Time for a case upgrade!

The variety of after market PC cases is almost overwhelming, and the prices range from less then $20 to well over $250. And a lot of them are damn ugly! This meant doing research and reading dozens of reviews about cases so I could get a good deal and not regret what I bought. After reading a positive review at Modders-Inc.com I chose an Ultra eTorque mid tower case. This case has a clean, solid look, it's well built, and has a good amount of room for expansion. It has four 5.25" bays, one 3.5" bay, five 3.5" HDD slots, and seven expansion slots on the back. Plenty of room for additional components! It also has a side window, which is something I wanted in a case just because it looks cool. And being the cheap bastard that I am I managed to find this case brand new on eBay for $50. Sweet!



The process of transferring all of the components into the new case was pretty straightforward and problem free. I'm impressed with the quality of the Ultra case. Everything fit just like it should. The case has a tool-less design that makes installing hard drives and CD/DVD burners incredibly simple. The case also had tool-less brackets for the front and rear case fans, but I opted to remove these in favor of mounting the fans with screws and silicone noise dampeners for a more solid mount. Each fan also has a variable speed control mounted in a rear expansion slot. And because this case has a side window I added red cold cathode tubes to the inside to give it a nice red glow at night. I also modified the front power switch to change the LED to red from the factory green LED, so it would match the red lighting inside the case.



The Rosewill PSU came with factory installed cable sleeving on all wires for a nice clean look. In order to keep the inside if the case a attractive as possible I sleeved all the wires for the fans and cold cathode components. This not only makes it look better inside the case but it also makes for better airflow. Round IDE cables were also added for the primary HDD and the two CD/DVD drives. And just for fun, red FireFlies LED lights were added to some of the molex connectors.



All put together this machine makes for a pretty decent PC. It's no high end gaming rig by any means, but for what I need, it will do just fine for now. It's a solid performer that's able to tackle just about any task that I want. But of course, I'll continue to make upgrades to it as time progresses. There's always room for improvement and tweaking!

Welcome to Anomalator.com. If you've been here before you'll obviously notice that there have been some major changes to this site. This site is now running Nucleus CMS instead of the built-from-scratch HTML site I had up here before. The old site was aesthetically pleasing but it was extremely outdated as far as posting of my more recent art and photography work, and it required more time then I have now to make changes. Enter Nucleus CMS. I figured I'd give a Content Management System a try as this is a much easier approach to building a site rather then trying to do all the coding from scratch. Plus a CMS has PHP built in for more functionality, which I know next to nothing about.

Initially I wanted to run Joomla, but after trying it out it seemed a bit too complicated for somebody that's a complete nooby to CMS, like myself. I also got the impression that Joomla is geared more towards larger scale sites and high traffic blogs, and for people that already know CMS. I don't need anything that intense. Nucleus, on the other hand, seems much simpler to use and it was a breeze to set up. And it should work just fine for what I need. So far, so good.

I'm not sure yet how well Nucleus will work as far as hosting visual content, but I guess I'll find out. And besides, half the fun of figuring something out is to see what it can and can't do.

Let the tweaking begin!

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