Alienware unveils new Area 51 ALX and Aurora tower designs

For a while Alienware has been telling us that they were going to have some big announcment at the Tokyo Game Show and big it is. They have a completely new chasis for their falgship PC, the Area 51 ALX. Its very different from their 2 previous predator designs. It reminds me of when they first showed of the predator 1 design, it was completly different from the towers they used before and I instantly fell in love with the design. I'm getting that same feeling, I'm completly in love with this new design. The picture above is of the ALX design, a second design is available and is smaller and based around a mATX motherboard. As for Alienware laptops, the m15x now has Core i7 processors and DDR3 ram. I'm guessing they will have the same available for their m17x in the next few months. Gizmodo has some more pictures of this awesome tower on their site.

Unfortunately for me I cant afford any of their new products, especially since I built myself a Core i7 machine this year. By the time I can afford a new PC USB 3.0 as well as SATA 3.0 will be on motherboards for both desktop PCs and laptops. Also Intel has some new technology involving high speed data cables using light instead of traditional electric wire for data transfer with speeds up to 100Gb/s. Those are expected to be released in consumer tech some time in 2010. What I will be doing though is ordering one of their Predator 2 towers for my next build.

Haruhi Season 2 end

The final episode of season 2 for Haruhi Suzumiya is out now. Unfortunately for me I have to wait a day or two for a.f.k. to upload their version of the episode. Maybe I'll just watch the Mazui upload but since I'm at work I cant do that right now, my breaks are only 10 min. Anyways once I finnish this episode the only thing that will feed my obsession will be the release of the second novel here in the US and the release of manga number 4. Hopefully it wont take them as long to bring out a third season. I enjoyed this season a lot but I still feel a little cheated with the endless eight episodes.

For some reason my font just changed and I cant fix it.

Data/Torrent Server update

Still planning on building the server, just need money. Still need a graphics card and some hard drives. Every item I want to bid on goes up by too much money in the last 2 minutes, so that has been messing up my plans since I'm trying to spend as little as possible. Will post pictures of the painted PC tower when I upload them off the camera.

In other news IGN has a live action Halo 3 ODST vid. Makes me wish we had the Halo movie right now. I think I got this pic on 4chan a long time ago.

Flikr page set up and first PC Mod

I set up my Flikr page with some pics from when I painted my current PC chassis. Will upload more pics of the finished product soon, as well as other pics. You will notice that part of the paint job is screwed up but I fixed all that before I coated it with clear coat. I used Clash aerosol paint that I got when I went to Italy. Now that I think about it I should have bought more cans and more colors. This was my first PC Mod and I hope to get better at it and eventually make my own custom chassis.

Also, that is not me in the pictures. That is my friend who I got to help me with the paint job since he has experience with spray paint.

San Francisco and Pizza!

I'll be going to San Francisco in about 7 hours so I'm gonna go to sleep in a few minutes. No real reason for the trip, its just that I saw an episode of Prototype This and they were eating Pizza from a certain restaurant in San Fran and so I decided to go get some. Two of my friends agreed and so we will be gone Saturday and Sunday.

Server Update

So far so good, I've been able to get a few of the parts I need for real cheap on ebay. Right now I've got a new power supply and a express card adapter coming in soon. The server will probably have to be connected to the network through wireless for the first few weeks. My old power supply died so I needed to replace it with one that could handle lots of hard drives. Now all I need is some hard drives with a large amount of space and a cheap low profile graphics card and I can get started.

On another note, I saw the movie Ponyo at the theaters with some friends. It may be a kids movie but damn it, Hayao Miyazaki sure knows how to make a good movie. If anyone has some time and has seen some of his movies or is into good stories and animation I suggest you go see it.

Data/Torrent Server

I've got an old mobo sitting on my desk with a Pentium 4 and 2 gigs of ram in it as well as an old case with a DVD drive and an 80 gig hard drive in it. I looked at it and thought of what I could do to get more life out of those old parts and almost immediately thought of setting up a data/torrent server. I've got hundreds of gigs worth of multimedia on my primary PC and no where else. I want a way to get that media onto other devices like my 360 or my other computers but without leaving my primary gaming rig running 24/7. It would cost too much and it would to annoying when I'd go to sleep. So setting up a PC with parts that suck up less power and putting it somewhere I wouldn't here it was a great idea. Only problem is I need to get some more parts, mainly a low-profile graphics card, a quiet power supply, and some more hard drives with plenty of storage space.

My goal right now is to get the power supply, graphics car, and a hard drive with at least 500 gigs of space for under 100 dollars which is my budget. Thanks to eBay I've found all that for under 50 dollars and new, I just hope no one bids on them in the next 3 days but as long as I get all those parts and stay within my budget I'm good. I even got an adapter for my old laptop wireless card. So I'm gonna be bidding on parts on eBay, I'm looking for new parts but I'll settle with used but working parts. I'm trying to save every penny since I don't much cash right now, which is why I haven't gotten a NAS device which is what I really want but cant afford at the moment.

Hopefully I'll have all the parts I need to get this started by next week. I'll be worth it if I can get the parts I need within my budget and later buy some more hard drives to really turn my old PC into a true Data/Torrent server. I even found an old Pentium D for with a starting bid of .99 cents and I may buy it, but I really don't know if I should since the Pentium D is not exactly known for its power saving features. I may be able to under-clock it and save power and extend its life.

I'll post updates and pictures as I get parts and stuff.

Above is and old pic of my ex primary gaming rig. The case has been stripped of all the plastic. I might not put the plastic back on and just leave it as a skeleton for easy cooling.