My New A10 Rig

[botat29]

fortkendad, I think, I'm seeing a Maroon and Grey CP meting a CNR on that painting ?

[fortkentdad]

You have a good eye - that is a painting of Bayview Junction near Hamilton, Ontario, it shows a CN Steamer waiting until a CP steamer passes the junction, and there are two black CN steam helper engines waiting to assist the next train heading up the Dundas climb, and off on another siding are two TH&B GP's in maroon & creme livery. It's called "Busy Bayview" by Larry Fisher. I met the artist in Toronto when Canada hosted the NMRA Annual Convention and he signed this print. Sadly that was a limited convention because it was scaled way back due to the SARS outbreak at the same time which discouraged many of the vendors and exhibitors from attending. Model Railroading is my other hobby. I've just bought a DCC System which will allow me to control my model railway via a computer - now I know what I'm going to do with all the left over spare parts I have from this A10 build - I have the makings of another salvaged RIG which I might use in my workshop - either that or I'll use my wife's old Vista laptop but probably reconfigure it as a Windows XP as I never liked Vista but XP was a fine system in its day. (I suppose I could see if it has the capacity to run Windows 7 but I would doubt it). The Railway software will also run in Linux which is a system I've heard of but have never used.

[fortkentdad]

Well my A10 Rig is now a dual boot, Windows 7 Home Premium or Windows 8.

Took better part of the day to load all the drivers & get the downloading of updates (remember I have all of 3 Mbps download out here in the country - some updates like Dirt3 took a couple of hours to download.

So far I've only tested on game Dirt3 and it works great. Didn't test the FPS but the image is very detailed and vivid.

I did buy a Logitech game controller to replace my Thrustmaster wheel - not quite the same but it works just fine. i debated ordering a Razer online but the $29 Logitech was available at Staples and I'm too impatient to wait a week to get a Razer version.

[fortkentdad]

Seagate 500GB Momentus XT 7200.1 SATA 2.5in Hybrid Drive w/ 32MB Cache at Memory Express

Picked up one of these 500 GB Hybrid Drives for my new rig (price matched with Newegg.ca for $53.49).

My system is currently dual booting (Win7 Home & Win8 Pro) using an older 750GB drive for the Win7 drive and a 120GB SSD for the Win8 drive. I plan on changing the Windows 7 dual boot to this new drive which should be faster and I'll also load the games I play onto this new drive.

I need to do a little more research on setting up a dual boot using my new Windows 8 Pro disk - which I think will set up a Windows 7 Pro version on this new drive and the boot choice screen will be a nice graphics page and not the bland DOS screen that comes up now.

I hope I can do this without the Windows 7 Pro original disks. I only have Windows 7 Home version disks and my new Windows 8 Pro upgrade disks ~ so I'm not sure that this will work, but I did see a tutorial somewhere on this and I think it will work. Any advice before I take on this project?

I'm going to set up the 750 as an internal drive to back up my photographs - I think there is a way to automatically copy all my images as I save them in mypictures onto this second drive without having to remember to go and either do a back up using Adobe Elements backup feature or just copy the images using the file manager. My primary storage drive is a 2T Drive at some point in the future when I hit the 750GB of images I'll need to change to a larger drive but that is a long way off. I have less than 250 GB of images.

[fortkentdad]

Just noticed this deal Intel SSD 330 Series SATA III Solid State Drive Kit, 180GB at Memory Express I still have the 500 GB Seagate Momentum XT Hybrid drive with me in the city. Should I exchange it for this 180 GB Intel all SSD for go for the Hybrid for my Windows 7 Drive on my A10 Rig. Hmmm, 180 GB of all SSD by Intel, or 500 GB of Hybrid drive by Seagate. The upgrade will cost me $40 more than I paid for the Hybrid drive. I'll be putting Windows 7 on this drive along with a few games (maybe up to 6 to 8 games) at a time. Decisions Decisions - maybe by the time I get to the store tomorrow (about noon) they may be sold out of this Black Friday special and I won't have to make a decision.

[fortkentdad]

Couldn't resist the intel deal - I now have more hard drives than bays in my box. Out with the old in with the new.