It’s only been 3 years since I bought my first custom built PC, but it’s time for me to upgrade. This time my friend Andrew helped me choose the parts and assemble it, so I’m very happy about it. Here are the parts and cost.

CPU: Athlon II 240 (Dual-core) RMB 449
Motherboard: AsRock 785G RMB 489
RAM: 2GB DDR3 RMB 309
Case: Antec NSK 3480 RMB 799
MSI Nvidia 8400GS RMB 199
HD: Hitachi 1TB HDT721010SLA360 RMB 559

TOTAL COST: RMB 2804

I bought all components online at 360buy.com, they deliver in 1 working day and can accept cash or cards. Perfect, so I don’t have to worry about online payment.

The motherboard has an integrated graphics card, with HDMI/VGA/DVI out, but I needed a S-Video out for my CRT TV, so I had to get another card. The case is a mini-tower, compact but big enough for 3 HDs and an optical drive. For the moment I put my old DVD drive and the 1TB Hitachi HD.

After transferring all data from the old desktop (and various external HDs), I have 250GB free. I’ll get another HD soon.

The CPU is obviously faster than the previous one, and it’s fast enough to play HD files (mkv, mp4 etc…). But the main “feature” my wife and I are happiest about: it’s very quiet. The previous PC was way too loud, it had 3 fans running (due to having 3 HDs and 2 DVD drives). Right now we can barely hear the new PC, which is good because it’s turned on 24/7.

I put it next to the old PC, which I’m going to reconfigure as a linux box. I’ll just use it as a backup storage. Linux is easier to control remotely. Then I will have a Mac Mini, a Windows PC, and a Linux PC. Perfect!!

Last Saturday my wife bought me an iPhone and I am so happy with it! It feels like a gadget from a sci-fi movie. However I am a bit nervous about carrying around a 4000RMB piece of gadget. I already lost the BlackBerry which was only 500RMB, but if I ever lost this it would be a disaster!!

Anyway, look for a full review soon on Reviewsarama.com

In the meantime here are some photos:

I think it’s safe to assume that everybody hates spam. When I was younger I would never check the mail box, even though it was just outside our door. So I didn’t care about spam mail until I was living by myself. It started while I was doing my undergrad in UK, everyday we would receive tons of junk mail through the mail hole in our door. So whenever we went out we would see all the junk on the floor.

Of course junk took a whole new dimension when talking about e-mails. I’ve always used webmail, because I moved a lot especially during my uni years. My first e-mail was hotmail, and I would use that to sign up to lots of stupid online sites/services, so I would get hundreds of junk mail everyday. I still check this e-mail to this day, but only to remove spam mail. Gmail is much better at it, even though that is a public e-mail (the one I use for this site).

Another spam is comments on this website. This is a blog that allows people to comment on my posts. Unfortunately there are programs called bots that crawl around the web and automatically leave spam comments with links to their own website. The more links a website get, the higher its rank in search engines is, the higher hits it gets, the higher ads revenue it gets. Luckily Wordpress is pretty good at fighting this kind of spam.

Ever since I moved to Shanghai, I get a new kind of spam: text messages on cellphones. I never used to get them in Italy or UK, but now I keep getting stupid text messages telling me about the weather, or some new phone services or other things that I don’t know about. The irony is that they’re obviously all in chinese, and I can’t even read them!! So this spam is really wasted on me. Do you get this kind of spam in your country?

Apple just announced a few new products. Go here to read my thoughts on them.