Am not talking about the game here, its about the recent PC rig i built, after having built a good performance machine and windows 7 RC was also round the corner, i decided to give it a shot, so i had an old 120GB PATA drive and installed win 7 RC, was good, but still the Windows experience index rated only 5.2, analysing it, it was the harddrive that created the bottleneck.

How can a HDD be a bottleneck in such a good PC and all the money spent in it, so started the search, at first, i thought i would go for a small WD Velociraptor for the OS and apps, but there was a huge upbeat about Solid state Drives, soon after a couple of reviews and benchmarks it was clearly evident that the two decent ones in the market are the OCZ and the Intel m-x25 drives, the Intel drive was clearly way put of my budget.

I had already made up my mind to make another hole in my pocket and plunge the SSD route, so started searching for a good price OCZ Core Series V2 SSD, finally got one on ebay for a good price.

Installed it on my PC with win7 and i can clearly see a world of difference with the loading speeds, boot speed increased considerably, app loads are all blazingly fast.

Previously win7 load on the PATA took 1:05 minutes and now its just 23 seconds to a usable desktop, applications like photoshop, lightroom and games like NFS and flight simulator load in less than half the time than it would have on a spindle SATA drive.

HDTune benchmarks also state pretty good IOps and read speeds, the random access time was the fastest that any spindle drive cannot achieve, its a mere 0.2ms, Write speeds are not that impressive, but am going to use this drive only for the OS and applications, all other data will stay on the 500Gb Seagate SATA drive, also have moved the pagefile and Temp files to the 500Gb drive

In all am happy that money spent is not a waste and quite satisfied with the SSD drive performance.

A recent mail forward, enjoyed reading this and how much meaning is packed into wonderful words, many a time we wander to much into the quagmire realms and fail to return back. Read on and enjoy!

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Money has no memory. Experience has. You will never know what the total cost of your education was, but for a lifetime you will recall and relive the memories of schools and colleges. Few years from now, you will forget the amount you paid to settle the hospitalization bill, but will ever cherish having saved your mother’s life or the life you get to live with the just born. You won’t remember the cost of your honeymoon, but to the last breath remember the experiences of the bliss of togetherness. Money has no memory. Experience has.

Good times and bad times, times of prosperity and times of poverty, times when the future looked so secure and times when you didn’t know from where the tomorrow will come… life has been in one way or the other a roller-coaster ride for everyone. Beyond all that abundance and beyond all that deprivation, what remains is the memory of experiences. Sometimes the wallet was full… sometimes even the pocket was empty. There was enough and you still had reasons to frown. There wasn’t enough and you still had reasons to smile. Today, you can look back with tears of gratitude for all the times you had laughed together, and also look back with a smile at all the times you cried alone. All in all, life filled you with experiences to create a history of your own self, and you alone can remember them all.

The first time you balanced yourself on your cycle without support… The first time she said ‘yes’ and it was two years since you proposed… The first cry… the first steps… the first word… the first kiss… all of your child… The first gift you bought for your parents and the first gift your daughter gave you… The first award… the first public appreciation… the first stage performance… And the list is endless… Experiences, with timeless memory… No denying that anything that’s material cost money, but the fact remains the cost of the experience will be forgotten, but the experience never.

So, what if it’s economic recession? Let it be, but let there not be a recession to the quality of your life. You can still take your parents, if not on a pilgrimage, at least to the local temple. You can still play with your children, if not on an international holiday, at least in the local park. It doesn’t cost money to lie down or to take a loved one onto your lap. Nice time to train the employees, create leadership availability and be ready for the wonderful times when they arrive. Hey! Aspects like your health, knowledge development and spiritual growth are not economy dependent.

Time will pass… economy will revive… currency will soon be in current… and in all this; I don’t want you to look back and realize you did nothing but stayed in gloom. Recession can make you lose out on money. Let it not make you lose out on experiences… If you are not happy with what you have, no matter how much more you have, you will still not be happy.

Make a statement with the way you live your life: How I feel has nothing to do with how much I have.

My love for printed circuit boards have popped up again after i got my nVidia video card, its a red multilayer board with components assembled in a neat array, wow, i was just holding it in hand and i could feel it and smell it.

Am getting a bigger love today, thats the motherboard, looks like am going to hug it and sleep

Monday was a roller-coaster to me, facing an angry friend in the morning, shouting at me for no reason of mine, i too burst into words, walked away with an irritated mind to the office, some nit picks at work that made me more irritated and an evening of bliss and unbounded happiness, is this not a roller-coaster ride.

That day evening was a public talk by my guru “Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev” and here is a excerpt of what he said about life and spirituality, cant relate to myself any more than this.

Spiritual process is a roller Coaster ride, nobody can explain it more logically than this, Roller coasters have had the least number of accidents among all the machines that can move, but the look of it is so scary, and the fun of twisting and turning and dropping and lifting cant ever be matched.

When yearning to walk the spiritual path, things would go haywire, but if we are rooted to ourself, no matter what, we can enjoy the ride, the turns, the drops, the twists and anything life throws at us in an amazing way.

I need to regain my sweet self!

From my previous post For Want of A.. i said am all excited building a PC, so for the last couple of weeks, its been hectic deciding what configuration to build for the most economical price without compromising on component quality, something which is key when you build your PC yourself, you will know where the pre-built PC guys compromise on.

Already purchased a Dell 2209WA e-IPS panel monitor last month.

So here is my config, haven’t got all the parts yet, so will upload fotos in a another post with the pics of the components and the build.

Intel Quad core Q9550 2.86Ghz CPU
Asus P5Q SE Plus Motherboard
Corsair PC8500 DDR2 2×2048Mb RAM
Corsair 650W TX Power supply unit
Zalman 9900LED CPU cooler
X-Blade Midi Atx Case
nVidia 9800GT 1024MB DDR3 PCI-e Video card
Samsung Dual layer DVD RW SATA drive
Seagate Barracuda 500GB 32MB 7200.11 SATA HDD
Linksys WMP54GS wireless PCI card 128Mbps
52 in 1 internal card reader

My photography skills seem to have improved from crap->worse->ok->Acceptable->Commentable.

A couple of forums that i am part of, i now see people take some time to comment on the fotos and give their opinions, so thats definitely a step towards a sense of accomplishment, not that i take photos for them to comment on, but I learn a lot from the comments i get from others, I can get their point of view and apply it in my visions, at the end of all this the decision is purely mine to accept or reject the comments.

Recently am seeing myself envisioning my vision on the field, i look at a scene, then capture it, open up the processing software of my choice, process it, give it a good look and then decide how it feels, all this is not done in my computer, instead in the mind, once i get this picture its easier to capture it in the camera.

One such capture that i decided is the one below, looking at it, i immediately thought i should use the Orton effect that will make the image pop and look artistic, and this is the result.

Hmm.. am enjoying it more now.

The huge hole am making in my pocket last month and this month, this nursery rhyme was what flashed in my mind immediately.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For want of a horse the rider was lost,
For want of a rider the battle was lost,
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

This is what am doing in photography as a hobby

For want of a art the camera was bought,
For want of a wider reach the wider lens was bought,
For want of a longer reach the longer lens was bought,
For want of a better sky the filters was bought,
For want of a better colour the polariser was bought,
For want of a better software the Adobe Lightroom was bought,
For want of a better visualisation the LCD monitor was bought,
For want of a better usability the keyboard and mouse was bought,
For want of a better place to keep all these the table was bought,
For a better use of  all the above, am building a desktop computer now,
And all for the want of a good photograph,
And that makes me complacent and in touch with nature.

Havent drained so much energy in such a short span of 2.5 days, it was supposed to be intense, but not to this extent of sqeezing every bit of available energy.

Day 1 was a 14 mile walk in a quest to get some good captures, i could not get anything good, that happens everytime in photography

Day 2 was 30 miles of biking up and down the hill terrain luggin the camera gear on my shoulders.

Totally drained and Day 3 was an unplanned activity booked by my friend, am still in shock as to how ‘HE’ booked such an activity, physical activity and my friend ‘BOW BOW are opposite poles, but somehow he must have seen the sample rope climbing and must have thought its easy

Day 3 became a GoApe day climbing trees, walking on Ropes, swinging between tree in Tarzan style.

Biking for 30 miles….i feel the pinch now wherever i sit, i guess you get the point

Aching shoulders and a painful behind and a sqeezed out body, my eyes are weary, but i still feel very fresh, the mountains and the greens makes my mind wander like a new born jumping with joy and recharged.

Its Earth day today, a day to appreciate the environment. So to create an awareness about it, here are 10 tips to save water

http://www.wikihow.com/Save-Water

More info here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day