Ye Olde Rad Blog

Been busy building a new system for a friend. Takes more time than I seem to recall. But I've done this enough times now to feel comfortable I can do it right, avoiding the common mistakes.

The system looks something like the black beast. It was designed and configured using known stability factors. The hybrid SCSI / ATA disk storage system was partitioned in accordance with these partitioning strategies, using FDISK.

The system is based on a zippy 2.8C-GHz Intel Pentium 4 CPU. First thing I did after installing the operating system and some basic programs and applications was to create a back-up Ghost image. We tried to use the latest version of Adaptec's ASPI layer drivers. But they gave us problems, so we had to revert back to old reliable v4.60 via ForceASPI. I ran a few cursory PC benchmarks and everything looks sweet.

First thing he wants to do when we're all done is to rip & encode his entire CD audio collection (using Exact Audio Copy). I encouraged him to use lossless audio compression, but he prefers to save space with the more compatible MP3 codec using LAME.

After that he wants to become proficient editing digital video in the hopes of creating a short movie that will help him get accepted into the world's best Film school at USC.