I'm a passionate web developer and systems architect living in Stockholm, Sweden. I work at Valtech and I am an EMVP.
About web development with ASP.NET and EPiServer, fatherhood and other adventures in my digital jungle
This Thursday my usual morning routine, playing two matches with Manchester City in Football Manager 2009, was disrupted by a nasty bluescreen. I rebooted only to be welcomed by another bluescreen upon entering Windows. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t the hardware's fault as my computer has been very reliable for three years and was built with good components. Still, since the easiest solution would probably be to reinstall Windows or locating that faulty driver this was the catalyst for buying a new computer and switching from XP to Windows 7 that I had been waiting for.
Since I’m working at a customers office in Sundbyberg during the summer, just a few hundred meters from Webhallen, the circumstances was perfect for buying a new computer on impulse. So, during the lunch me and Andreas (one of the customers developers) headed over to Webhallen and started shopping. Since I’m very happy with my Antec Sonata chassis and Seasonic PSU I decided to keep them, but I bought pretty much everything else. Here’s my shopping list:
While most of the hardware isn’t something particularly special the real beauty is the hard drive. I’ve had a solid state disk in my laptop at work (a Dell Precision M6400) for a few months now and I’m loving it! Or at least I think I do. It may just be that the other components in the computer is great, but my gut tells me it’s the disk that makes tasks like installation of new software, starting up programs like Photoshop and even compiling sooo much faster than with any of the machines I’ve previously used.
Today I installed most of the software that I usually use such as Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, Photoshop, Flash, Office, a couple of SVN clients, and a few other programs. It took less than an hour! SSD FTW!
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Comments
Martin S. 1 years ago
Interesting stuff! I'll have a look at SSD disks when I upgrade next time.
Overall, how silent is the computer?
Joel Abrahamsson 1 years ago
Well, I have the stock cooler for the CPU and I'm using my old Raptor (10 000RPM) as secondary harddrive so it's not exactly silent :(
Martin S. 1 years ago
You really should try replacing the stock cooler with a nice heatsink (here's a list: http://www.prisjakt.nu/kategori.php?l=s39612944&o=prod_rank).
You don't know what you've been missing until you get a really silent computer. It's totally worth the extra money to have silent quality components.
Joel Abrahamsson 1 years ago
Thanks Martin, but the Raptor pretty much makes it impossible to make the computer silent.
I usually use one of Zalmans big coolers but this time around I just didn't feel like spending the extra 30 minutes mounting the cooler and figuring out a way to squeeze it into the case :)
Krummi 11 months ago
I found your site through my Google search "football manager + ssd". I was wondering what's your experience playing Football Manager with a SSD? Is it much faster? Are the loading times in the game shorter?