Musicalmidget’s Blog

Well, the rest of my family have just left for a holiday, meaning the house is all mine for a week.

Let’s see, what shall I do with a large house all to myself…?

I’ve finally updated some parts of my PC that I’ve needed to do for a while now. I’ve had my computer about three years now, and I was still using some of the original hardware, including the original CPU and motherboard. As time has progressed this hardware has rapidly become out of date and I’ve recently noticed my computer taking forever to load just a simple program. So, the other day I thought “enough is enough, it’s time to upgrade”.

Due to starting university in September, I’m on a very limited budget as I need to save as much as I can. However, I’ve managed to get some pretty good new hardware for roughly £200 in total. The first thing to buy was a new CPU. The old one was only a 1GHz chip which is now below the standard for many new programs, especially games. I found a fairly cheap AMD Sempron 2800+ (2GHz) chip online, so bought one. Next was the motherboard. My old one worked fine but it can only take chips that are upto 1.4GHz, so again I found a fairly cheap MSI motherboard which could handle my new chip easily. Finally, I needed some new DDR RAM, as the RAM in the old board was only SD RAM and of no use to me anymore. All done? Sadly not.

That was everything I was intending to replace, but problems soon arose. Yesterday after I had placed the new board into the tower I found that the new board was slightly wider than the last, and although it still fit, the back of my DVD drive was hanging over the edge of the cable that connects my power supply to the motherboard. As I moved the DVD drive it cut across the power cable and left wire exposed. Uncomfortable with the idea of using a damaged cable, I decided to get a new PSU. However, I realised that I would still have the same problem with a new power supply in place, so decided to hunt for a new, slightly larger tower unit that had enough room for the mainboard without the ROM drives getting in the way. The hunt for a new tower began and I’ve come back with something very special. It’s a silver tower with a clear window in the side. It has three fans and 4 LED’s around each fan (one red, one yellow, a green and a blue). Additionally, there is a blue fluorescent strip light in there that gives the inside a nice blue tint when the power is on. It looks very impressive, especially in the dark. If only I had a digital camera I would take a photo and post it. Of course, I thought it was better to get a slightly more powerful PSU due to all the lights and fans in there drawing power. All in all the price was still reasonable.

To finish off I bought a new graphics card whilst I was out. There was nothing really wrong with the fairly new card I had, but we needed an upgrade for the graphics card in the other machine and found a cheap GeForce FX 5200 card which produced some really good looking graphics, so I decided to grab another one of those for myself whilst I was out. I’ve not had much time to test it yet but what I’ve seen so far looks quite impressive.

The actual installation of the new hardware went fairly well yesterday but I ran into serious problems when I first turned the system on again. That’s because what I hadn’t taken into account when buying all the new stuff was that Windows XP doesn’t like major hardware changes due to the way XP is installed. Therefore when I booted up the machine Windows simply wouldn’t load (not even in safe mode) and I was forced to format the drive and reinstall XP. I obviously have a lot of software to reinstall, but thankfully I keep backups of all my important things on both my second hard drive and my laptop, so only very little data was actually lost.

Everything is up and running again and I’m in the process of reinstalling everything and getting the PC back on track to how it was before. If anyone was wondering why I’ve hardly been online over the last couple of days you probably see why now. That said, I managed to prove to myself I could install a new motherboard, which I had actually never done before, simply because my last machine was still my first, which was built for me years ago. I’m quite looking forward to building my brothers PC for him in a month or two now.

Now I’m going to go back to the long list of things to reinstall and see what I can get done before bed.

Well, the first phase of the major work we’re having done in the house is now complete. The new kitchen and new bathroom are now in place and everything is working and starting to take shape. However, this is only really the first phase of the work complete, as now we’re left with the task of decorating.

Really, all we need to do in terms of decorating is paint the walls and ceilings but in our house that job is never as simple as it seems. My family will be away next week, so I imagine we’ll leave the painting until they return home. Maybe then our house will look a little more like a house once again.

Not much more happening at the moment, although I’ll be posting again soon about some cool new computer upgrades I’ll be installing over the next few days.

“According to our records you own a copy of Sibelius that was upgraded or first registered after 6th June 2005. This entitles you to a free upgrade to Sibelius 4 - all you’ll pay is the £9 delivery charge.

I’ll bet you can imagine how suprised I was to get that letter through my door this morning. Having just paid roughly £460 for a package containing Sibelius 3 and Kontakt Player Gold, when I saw a letter mentioning the new Sibelius 4 I thought the people from Sibelius were going to try and sell me an upgrade at around £150, which is usually the case. As it turns out, because I bought my copy of Sibelius a little before the release of version 4 (which costs between £360 to £600) I’m allowed to upgrade for nothing. I don’t plan on passing this offer up!

I certainly feel glad I decided to take the big step of buying Sibelius when I did, or else I probably wouldn’t be getting this offer. I suppose I’d better fill in the application form and send it off…

Thankfully, my saxophone exam went pretty well this morning despite feeling rather nervous. I’ve managed to get 85 marks out of 100 meaning I passed with distinction. I’m still quite shocked actually, as I thought a few minor slips may have cost me the distinction grade, but I’m certainly not complaining.

Now that the exam is a load off my mind I don’t have quite as much to worry about any more. All I need now is for the builders to finish putting my house back together and I can relax for a while.

Next test to book…driving! :S

Tomorrow is quite an important day that has been on my mind for a while now. I’ll be taking an exam on my saxophone, the results of which could determine whether or not I get into the university of my choice. I’m pretty sure I can pass but for some reason I really don’t feel prepared and so the nerves are starting to build. In the past I’ve not felt too nervous about such exams, but there’s so much riding on this one it’s hard not to in this case.

Think of me at 9:50 AM tomorrow as I’ll be stepping into the exam room.

Well, here we are at last. My first post on my first blog.
How exciting…

I’ve been meaning to set up a blog for quite a while now and just never got around to it, so tonight I decided to change that. It’s nothing special yet but in time who knows. One day I’ll probably work on creating a unique theme for the blog, but as I’m fairly new to WordPress I’ll take some time to get used to it first. Besides, the default theme is quite attractive anyway if you ask me.

So, to start the ball rolling, here’s a run down of what’s going on in my life at the moment…

Anyone who’s spoken to me recently is probably aware that we’re having quite a bit of work done at the moment so my house is in quite a mess. We’re having a new kitchen and a new bathroom. The kitchen is pretty much in now, we just need to paint the damn thing. The bathroom is starting to take shape but still isn’t quite there yet. At least we finally have a working shower again, it was hell without one.

Last week I took a spur of the moment break from all the building work. I went to see a friend and ended up staying with him most of the week whilst his parents were away. I’m glad to have had the break, I’m feeling a little more refreshed now.

Although all of my final A level exams are out of the way now, I’ve got an exam on my saxophone coming up this week, so think of me on thursday morning. Usually I don’t worry so much about graded exams, but so much is riding on this one, such as my place at University. I’m fairly confident I’ll pass it, but I still feel worried. I suppose that’s just natural.

I had my last ever concerts with the music centre bands at the weekend. No more 1 o’clock Concert Band, no more Vermuyden Concert Band, and no more Doncaster Schools Symphonic Band (DSSB) which was my favourite of all. I’ll try and visit the bands as much as possible when they start again next year, but travelling between the university and home every weekend may prove to be quite difficult, especially as I probably won’t have a car yet when I leave. I’m sure the bands at Hull University will keep me happy though.

The above events have meant that something have taken a backseat recently, including working on MyBB and some of my music compositions. I’ll be picking up on those things again pretty much as soon as I finish writing this entry. MyBB will probably come first as I’ve got to catch up with a lot of changes to the code which have been made over the last week or so whilst I’ve been gone. I’ll get back into the music stuff soon too and look at getting some things published on Sibelius Music in the near future.

Any how, that’s a run down of thing which have been going on recently. I don’t know how often I’ll be posting here, probably just whenever I feel the urge, so keep checking back from time to time…

Bye for now.