So, about 6 months after I realised I needed to upgrade my PC I’ve finally done it!

I now have a shiny AMD Sempron 3100+ on a Gigabyte K8NS-PRO with a Gig of Crucial RAM. This also means I now have the mighty increased speed of USB 2.0, SATA drives, Firewire and lots of other things that my old motherboard didn’t support. Needless to say, pretty much everything runs a heck of a lot quicker.

This whole hardware thing had moved on a bit since I last put a PC together (man, that makes me sound old). The motherboard has a nice plastic guide thing for the heatsink and it all clips in very neatly and easily. No jamming a screwdriver into fiddly bits of metal and forcing clips onto tiny bits of plastic. This motherboard has something daft like 3 RAID controllers, onboard sound, LAN, kitchen sink etc which makes the BIOS setup screen an absolute mess of options – the only downside to all this increased complexity. So far though, everything has run very smoothly and my CPU temperature when under load has dropped to around 30°C (from 60°C plus).

Ian Livingstone gets OBE in New Year honours

It’s the 2nd and I’m only just posting this….slackness ahoy.

New Years Eve was really good fun. Kerry finished worked at 8 so after that we got ready and headed down to Alex’s flat with two carrier bags full of booze. The place was already pretty jumping when we got there so we set about playing with the mighty Cocktail Machine which now used RFID tags for user logins! Pretty clever stuff. Lots and lots of people were there, about 8 people seem to live in this house and so there were a lot of friends and cliques to invite. At 12 we got a good view of the fireworks off the crags and Graeme had some cute little garden fireworks which we set off. After that it was just more fooling around, eating sausages off the barbeque, covering silly things in chocolate with the chocolate fountain and talking with, ex-flatmate of 4 years, Pete (who I hadn’t seen in about 2 years). We eventually left about 4:30 am and after walking Pete home crashed into bed. Bloody good night

More pictures up on Flickr.