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Archive for January, 2010

Every time I purchase an upgrade at their discounted price, a few days later they come out with a whole new version. I just bought the Uber Deluxe Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate Edition complete with all the bells and whistles and today Corel sends out that the X3 edition is available. Curse you! I haven’t even had my version for two months and now there’s a yet another upgrade. The insensitivity of it all!

I’m not sure if I even need this new edition. I’m sure I’ll download the trial and see what it has to offer.

However, if you’re looking for a deal you can buy the new Paint Shop Pro X3 for $59. However, I have another trick up my sleeve. If you use the coupon BONUSBUCKS20 you will save another $20 off the price. Not 20%, but $20. So now you buy it and tell me how cool it is.

Paint Shop Pro X3

My new machine arrived on the doorstep last night and I wasted no time in hooking it up and checking it out. It was smaller than I thought, the Inspiron case is noticeably smaller than my previous Dimension case. But it was quite and fired right up. I zipped around inside Windows 7 for a couple of minutes, then promptly turned it off and dismantled it.

I wasted no time in removing the original 640GB hard drive and replacing it with my own 1.5TB and 1.0TB drives. Additionally I stuff in two video cards, one PCIe and the other PCI. The case is an absolute pain to work with and you need to be careful you don’t slice your finger off on all the exposed edges of bare metal. Fact of the matter is, there’s tons of extra room inside the case for more drives, but the odd design doesn’t allow for more than two. I suppose I could just "stack" them in there and hope they don’t start rattling around.

With the innards completely changed around I powered it back up and installed Windows 7. I admit Win7 did a great job of installing itself. It picked up all the drives and understood there were two video cards and three monitors hooked up. It loaded a basic set drivers and multimon was working without me having to configure anything. I need to actually install updated drivers but I liked how Windows got it right.

Funny thing is, I installed Windows and got several apps installed in less than an hour. You can’t actually get XP installed in an hour so that’s progress!

I didn’t get much done with it, but it’s still running even after I ripped it’s guts out and made all sorts of hardware changes. Tonight will be a frenzy of app installations. I got a few of the smaller apps done and even got Office 2007 on there, but there is still so much to install.

So what did I actually get you ask? An Athlon II X4 630 with 8GB of Ram. I added 2.5TB of drive space and two NVidia graphics cards (an 8500 and a 6200).

I wasn’t going to get a machine from Dell, but just out of curiosity I checked their inventory and low and behold they’re selling AMD machines again. I looked two weeks ago and they didn’t have any. After all my tinkering around to find all the right pieces it looks like I might just go with a Dell machine again. I will have the same problem of it not being the most expandable machine in the world, but if I use the same video cards and the same hard drives I already have I’ll still be incredibly happy with it.

Plus in the sobering light of reality I will probably scale back my "hair on fire" machine to something a little more realistic. Even still, compared to what I have even an Athlon II X4 will be screamer. Plus $300 less.

I feel we may be getting close.