kerry
Kerry is a mother of two and has a loving husband. She enjoys writing and blogging about a variety of topics. Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com
Homepage: http://www.callcatalog.com
Posts by kerry
Kerry’s Home Made Computer
Mar 9th
The Frustration: I’ve been accumulating quite a few home videos and finally wanted to do something with them. My kids have been begging me to place them on DVDs so we can easily watch them on TV — also, I’ve been a little concerned that eventually my mini-dv tapes will gradually go bad like all magnetic media does. I trudged to the computer and hooked up my firewire to the computer and uploaded the first video. After 5 hours of processing I realized my computer may be a little outdated — I have an old Dell AMD computer that I thought was sufficient for what I’ve been doing…no longer.
I want a good, fast computer. One that doesn’t take 5 or 6 hours to process a video which leaves me quite frustrated especially when we’re all now in a culture of having the here and now immediate feedback. I looked at a decent dell for $1099 that included a 23″ monitor but realized that that would be the easy way out, and also not likely the truly fastest. For maybe a little more, I was hoping to put together a smoking (possibly overclocked) computer that will let me deal with anything coming my way — especially those videos.
My research: Having never built my own computer before, this was something new to me. Albeit that I do have an engineering degree with some (though somewhat limited) or maybe just enough knowledge to get me into trouble. I did loads of research to identify the best price to performance ratio while still getting myself a sweet system. This is what i came up with:
The Parts:
- Case: Antec Three Hundred Illusion Black Steel ATX Mid Tower
- Memory: G.SKILL PI Series 12GB (6 sets of 2gb)
- Antec EarthWatts EA650 650W Continuous Power ATX12V (crossfire ready)
- Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s
- Harddrive: SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb
- Video card: HIS H577FM1GD Radeon HD 5770 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express
- DVD: LiteOn DVD R + – Ram Light Scribe… $35!
- CPU: Intel I7-930
- CPU Cooler: cooler master Hyper 212 plus (extra cooling for overclocking)
My next post I’ll chronicle how I set it up and its performance.
What do you guys think of my setup so far?
Kerry is a mother of 2 great kids and a wonderful husband. Her favorite website is callcatalog.com a reverse phone directory.
The parts are inbound
Lite-ON iHAP222-06 DVD Burner – 22X DVD+R, 22X DVD-R,
Is your Mouse Broken? Use this cool trick for a short term solution.
Dec 31st
Ok, so it really doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. Yeah, drat, your mouse has broken after you used it by accident on top of that peanut butter smudge on your desk. Here’s an obscure yet real windows tool you can use to make your keyboard act as a mouse until you get that replacement. To do this, you push at the same time, Alt+Left shift key + NumLock . You’ll get a pop-up window saying to
1) Use Mouse Keys, click OK
2) Cancel MouseKeys, click CANCEL
3) Deactivate, click settings….blah, blah blah.
When you get the popup you can click the settings button and customize the feature as well.
How many of you knew about this? We all knew about the OSK I wrote about here but not this one!
Kerry is a wanna-be geek who periodically writes on the the AskTheAdmin website. Her favorite website is callcatalog.com which is a reverse phone lookup website that allows you to do a reverse phone number lookup.
Bet you haven’t seen this before — osk?
Oct 18th
I love messing around with my computer and know some cool computer things, but this one really caught me. I doubt its anything I’ll ever use BUT maybe you can bet your friends about this over a beer or two. Yes…its an onscreen keyboard. So, I guess the only use would be if you spilled coffee on your keyboard but you really have to get that one email out.
You can peck and click the keyboard to enter text with your mouse.
To do this,
1) Click Start–>Run
2) Enter “OSK” in the area, and hit ENTER.
And, now a fully functioning keyboard on your screen — usable by your mouse.
Kerry is a part time computer geek (really). Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory for unwanted phone numbers. Here is her blog .
Goofy But Cool — surf with your calculator
Jul 23rd
Ok, you’re on a desert island and…well, lets just say that you encounter a computer without IE and firefox. So you can use word, etc… but no way to surf the internet. Before you say it, no, windows explorer isn’t available either.
Here’s the simple trick:
1) Open the calculator (or any microsoft program)
2) Push F1 or the “help topics” button
3) Select the icon on the top, left corner. Its the one that has a magnifying glass on it.
4) Select the “Jump to URL” link
5) Enter the link you want in the field, eg “http://www.cnn.com”
Any other cool ways to surf that you can think of?
Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics. Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone number directory website that allows you to lookup and report unwanted phone calls. You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.
Simple Trick to Keep Your Computer from Locking Up
Jun 21st
How many times have you been working on your Windows computer and without warning it locks up. Unfortunately many of us will say that this happens much more than you’d like. One of the key reasons that your computer locks up is due to a non-responsive program, in other words a program or file running just gets stuck.
Fortunately, windows has an option that allows you to get one step closer to avoiding those very annoying lockups. This isn’t a cure-all, but can be helpful. This only requires a simple tweak to your registry. Here’s how…. (note: I always make a backup of my registry before making changes, so I recommend you do this first but not required).
1) Go To Regedit: Start -> Run -> Type: Regedit
2) Find the correct directory: HKey_Current_User -> Control Panel -> Desktop
3) Find the correct file: Look on the right side and scroll down to find WaitToKillAppTimeout. You’ll notice that this likely says 20000 today. That’s the time in miliseconds that it waits before it stops an application that has locked up. That’s 20 seconds! But we’ll change that…..
4) Modify the File: Double click on WaitToKillAppTimeout. You’ll then get a new window that allows you to edit the “Value Data”. I changed mine to 1000 (1 second). Then click “OK” to complete the modification.
5) Close out of the registry. Click the big x on the top upper right.
6) You’re done….
One step closer to a finely tuned machine.
Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics. Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website that allows you to lookup and report unwanted phone calls. You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.
4 Simple Steps to Change Your Computer Sounds
May 26th
Tired of your standard Windows Startup and Shutdown tunes?
If you’re like me, you use your Windows-based computer almost every day. The startup and shutdown sounds have just gotten a little boring to be honest. Here are some simple steps to use your favorite voice, music excerpt, or sound for your computer’s start-up and shutdown sequence. You’ll need two soundbites.
Step 1. Choose the soundbites: Choose the track which you want to play at start-up and shutdown jingles. Key to note:
- It must be in the .WAV format.
- The soundbite shouldn’t be too long otherwise you could be waiting for the bite to end before you begin computing.
Your preferred file is likely an mp3, but regardless, if its not in .WAV format, you can easily convert it using any converter. My preference is audacity, which is an open source music editor <– it allows you to actually select a “soundbite” from any song.
Step 2. Rename the new files. Rename these files as “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV” respectively.
Step 3. Rename the old files.
- Goto “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”
- Find the files “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV”, and rename them to Windows XP Startup_old.WAV and Windows XP Shutdown_old.WAV respectively. This step is required for the case if you need to revert back to these sounds, otherwise you can ignore this step and just delete them (not recommended).
Step 4. Save your new files. Just copy your files from step 2 into the directory “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”
You now have new startup and shutdown tunes.
Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics. Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website. You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.
