The Wider View ...........

Nah! its not a rant about the earth-shattering happenstances which befall me from time to time, simply that I've got a new monitor on the HP PC. Once again an impending influx of moolah and purchasing conditions ("you must buy hardware before you can buy Windows XP at this price") qualified the purchase.

This is a YURAKU 22" TFT Wide-screen, and of course I'm quite pleased with it, especially as it cost only a smidgen over £100. This has replaced my ancient but reliable 19" CRT, which when I bought it maybe seven years ago or more cost me about £700+. Of course at that price it doesnt have HDMI or even DVI interface, but hey! its a monitor FFS! How times have changed, even good quality kit has dropped in price. The wide-screen is pretty cool, suppose I should watch a DVD on it..... Anyway I also changed the screen resolution to 1280 x 800, which to my simply logic equates to nearly 4x3 ratio.

OK thats it, I'm outta here! Sayonara !!

Its ALIVE !!

Its ALIVE !!

Ah well now, the HP PC replacement for BigBox has been installed & must say that it is running pretty well. Its amazing the things that you can discard once push comes to shove. Having arranged my data storage on the BB II, all I had to do was remove the 2nd HDD and insert it into the HP PC. This gives me another HDD with the original working data for the whole family, and yet another partition to use for backup. I also have the One-Touch drive for data backup, but I'm not using the horrendous Retrospect software for backups, I'm using COBIAN BACKUP 8, which is automatic and excellent. The HP PC has a Firewire socket on front which I will be able to use, and about 8 USB sockets (2 front, 6 rear) which will add facility.

After many years of excellent service BigBox II is no more I'm afraid. A critical evaluation of it proved to be more critical than evaluation, and I decided that the hardware wasn't worth rescuing, not even as a Linux box, so it will be stripped down and the components used in a new BigBox ( Son of BigBox II ). I think we'll go smaller, faster, better this time around and maybe even stretch to a Vista build for-as-little-dosh-as-I-need-to-spend. I feel an eBay session coming on.......