I am the *not free*

As some of you might have known, I have not been posting for quite some time. All I can say was, I wasn't gaming ........*not totally*. In this week time , I guess I have learned one of those most important thing you have to know when you are studying for a computing degree: How to build a PC. Maybe the building process isn't that important, but what does, is knowing the architecture of what is in the chassis. I boldly admit that before I had the chance to build this PC, I had no idea how some stuff looks like even though I have read about them before. Some example are like the SATA and IDE cable, what they are use for and so on. Before I continue on, I must thank a certain good friend and all around good guy, Benjamin, because he was the one who taught me how to assemble/ disassemble a PC, followed me to LowYat Plaza (not once but twice) to get my PC parts, and made sure all goes well and constantly guide me whenever I did something wrong. Mei is lucky to have him =P.

So, back to my PC, we managed to get quite a lot of good parts at a low price, and by the end of the day, we used 3.1k for buying all the hardware. Of course that's not for the entire PC, I used my old printer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, DVD rom and an external HDD. The new parts include the following:
(1) Asus P5KR mobo (P35 chipset)
(2) Asus EN8800GT 512 MB GDDR3
(3) Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4 GHz 1066 FSB 8 MB L2 cache)
(4) 2 x 1GB 800 MHz DDR2 Corsair RAM
(5) Cooler Master Chassis which came with a 460W PSU
(6) Western Digital 160 GB HDD

It wasn't easy deciding the parts I wanted, even though on the night before I was awake till 3 a.m. looking at the price list at lowyat's website . Even on that day I made a lot of changes to what I initially had planned to get. I would not say I was in a rush to get the parts but some might disagree. Although I wasn't a professional, I did ask for other's opinion such as Ben's friend(Jay) who is also another tech enthusiast. From him, I learned things such as XP can only run at max a total of 3.5 GB ram (the main reason I switched to a higher performance 2GB ram). He did gave a lot of good advice IMO, and I would like to thank him for that again.

Probably what surprised me was how powerful my new rig was, for one, it ran on High Settings for Crysis. What was even amazing was the fact that, it did not lag and yet it looked so freaking good. That changed slightly when Ben applied a DX10 skin mod for Crysis, but still that was only a very minimal lag. Even though my PC is no powerhouse, it is already capable of running the most demanding game at high settings, and that, I have nothing to complain about.

Oh yeah, since I just got my PC, there are still a lot of stuff I had yet to install which includes the Nokia Phone Software so I could not upload any pictures yet. Darn, now I can't show off my new rig.=P

Then today, I brought my girlfriend over to APIIT/ UCTI to register for the foundation program there. If everything goes fine, she will be starting her course mid of January. I have to say, UCTI has a really nice environment to study in, even the facilities there are very well done. I did actually considered studying there before I came to INTI but I have chosen the current college now mainly because I wanted to do a degree which allowed me to study in the US.

Right after that, we went shopping at Midvalley Megamall, my girlfriend did her usual window shopping and once in a while bought some stuff, and I just followed her to everywhere she go, excluding the lady's toilet. It was tiring but I did not mind, my girlfriend was back to her usual self, maybe cause one of her load, which is choosing where to study has been done and over with. I would gladly go shopping with her if she wanted to, even if it was tomorrow. As long as she is happy = ). We had dinnner at Sushi King and I just ate and ate non stop to recover the loss energy from all that walking. After that, we continued shopping for a bit before leaving.

Ohh I did went and got myself a couple of Blizzard's novels again. One of them being the 2nd book of Starcraft's Dark Templar Saga. I can't wait to start reading before my holiday ends. Hope I can finish them all. The other two is from Blizzard's Diablo saga.

Oh yeah I nearly forgot about Bleach for this week. Episode 152 "Ichigo Strikes Back! This is my Bankai", with such a title, you are sure to see Ichigo's Tensa Zangetsu. He is still in a battle with the Privaron Espada and this battle was the main focus of this week's episode. There are some funny scenes in the current episode that would sure to make you laugh or at least giggle. Below are some screenshots.