Paul and Emily dot com

I recently added some new toys to my geeky collection. Back in October, Dmoney hooked me up with a new phone – the HTC 6700 for SprintPCS. I LOVED this phone, I actually used the mobile Word/Excel frequently, it was excellent for text messaging, was convenient to have a decent camera around, etc. Last week, the keyboard started to go out – requiring pretty excessive pressing to get things like the space bar and lower qwerty keys to work. It was also starting to lock up once in a while and when a reminder popped up, it immediately went away so I couldn’t disable, snooze, etc.
Anyway, our SprintPCs contract expired almost a year ago, so we decided to shop around to see what was available. After visiting a bunch of websites and spending some time in the CinciBell store, we determined our current plan with Sprint simply rocks and couldn’t find anyone to even match it. Long story short, Emily and I both got new phones yesterday. She got a new Katana and I got the HTC Mogul (the 6800). The Mogul is faster and runs Windows Mobile 6. Love the phone. Couple pics I stole from the net:

Next, I built a new computer. My previous PC was a Gateway we bought at Best Buy almost three years ago – AMD dual core 3800+ with (upgraded) 3GB RAM and one XFX 8800 GT 512mb video card.
Instead of store bought, I decided to go back to my old hobby and build one. I went to my old favorite, Newegg.com to do the shopping. I went with:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 Yorkfield 2.66GHz, 12MB Cache
Motherboard: XFX MB-N780-ISH9 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI
CPU Cooler: ASUS V-60 92mm Vapo Bearing
RAM: mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066
Video: XFX PVT88PYDE4 GeForce 8800GT Extreme 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 – Added this to run in SLi
Case: Cooler Master Cosmos 1000
Power Supply: ZALMAN ZM750-HP Continuous 750W Modular LED Heatpipe-Cooled SLI Power Supply

This is by far the highest class machine I have ever built. I ran the FutureMark 3dMark06 on both my old computer and new computer and was pretty amazed. The old PC was running Vista Ultimate 32 bit and the new PC is running Windows XP Pro 64bit (to utilize all 4GB ram). 3Dmark on the old PC hit 3906 marks. The new PC was around 14,567 marks!! I may go to Vista 64Bit, but wasn’t really impressed with Vista enough for the 1.5 years or so I ran it. The changes to the control panel and Windows Explorer were enough to put me off. I never ran into stability or driver issues when using Vista, even with my printers.

Share on Facebook