Nothing infuriates me more than early Christmas music. I’m sat here on the laptop, keeping an eye on the support desk having my lunchtime cuppa and some food and “The Hits” are playing Cliff Richard Christmas songs. Do they not realise its October? Christmas starts on Christmas day for the ’14 days of Christmas’… not in October for 3 months!! We’re not even at Halloween yet!
I got my new laptop Friday just gone, a long due replacement for my Dell Inspiron 5160 which finally died completely 6 weeks ago. After vowing to never buy another Dell laptop having had three die, and not being able to find an Acer with a screen resolution to suit… I opted for a HP Compaq 6715b - and what a great choice that was.
The machine has a very nice 1680×1050 widescreen display, which more importantly doesn’t have any of this “Bright” or “ClearView” glossy-screen technology. ClearView to me, basically means you can see your own reflection, and nothing but, when any amount of sunlight hits the screen. Dual Core AMD X2 CPU, 2GB DDR2 RAM and a 128MB ATI graphics card are a nice step up from my old single core Dell and the biometric fingerprint logon is the best gimmic by far. (Boys and their toys!!) I was tempted to use a Toe-Print instead, but decided that maybe it wouldn’t impress clients when logging on at the meeting table.
and the price of all this, including Vista Business: £625 inc VAT & Delivery!
After months of costing, planning and hard work its finally good to go. SynergyWorks Kent location, based within the Kent Science Park near Sittingbourne has a ready for service date of 1st August 2007.
I have to admit its been a long journey finding a cost effective out of London site located in my home county. The Maidstone TV studio’s DC was totally unviable as it uses a Telewest internet connection, and anybody who knows me, know I can’t stand anything Telewest/NTL. “The Bunker” out towards Ash was an intresting experiance. 100ft underground with blast-proof concrete and 90 days of fuel - but being “Ultra Secure” you had to have a security guard sit with you and watch your every move.
The contract at the KSP was signed on Monday and i’ve recently settled the rather painfull installation invoice. Cables are being run in Telehouse on Friday to get the new Kent racks back to the SynergyWorks network core in TelecityRedbus Meridian Gate.
For anybody half intrested, a PDF about the site is located here: http://www.synergysupport.net/index.php?_m=downloads&_a=viewdownload&downloaditemid=5&nav=0
I bought this week (from eBay) a Dell version of the nVidia GeForce 7800GTX PCI-E graphics card, taken second hand out of a XPS gaming PC. This is exactly the same card as I currently have in MSI form, but, with Dells huge heatsink and 80cm fan. The Dell card takes up two card slots, as apposed to the MSI’s single slot requirement.
As was to be expected, Dells version of the card runs cooler due to the huge heatsink… but I was suprised as to the extend of this. 75c at idle from the MSI card, compared to 47c from the Dell…. with this in mind, I couldn’t help but try and overclock the Dell.
So far i’ve taken the GPU speed from 430Mhz to 470Mhz and DDR3 RAM speed from 1200Mhz to 1300Mhz. The card now runs under load at 60c. This is still cooler than the MSI 7800GTX at idle! Above 470Mhz I think I risk artifacts during gameplay - but I may tweak a tiny little bit more!
Got given a link to this today: http://www.speedtest.net/ - rather a funky and unique Broadband/Cable speed tester, which unlike most speed test facilities has a UK server!
This evening was a fun event… or better put, a complete waste of my time. I spent nearly four hours making the 40 minute trip from my home in Kent, to London Docklands and never managed to reach my destination. After three hours, I decided to give up.
Upon returning home I checked the BBC Travel website, to read:
A102 London - Tunnel closed northbound between the Sun In The Sands Roundabout junction and the A102 Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach junction in Greenwich, because of a shed load. Diversion in operation.
Turns out the shed load was actually a load of asbestos, so im pretty glad I wasn’t let in the tunnel to be quite honest - nevertheless, a complete waste of time, money and petrol! I’ll try again tomorrow….
This week saw the first Core2Duo based server hit the SynergyWorks racks, and what a nice suprise its been. Nearly half the power usage over the Pentium-D chips i’m replacing teamed with mind boggling performance.
SynergyWorks currently offers Virtual Dedicated Servers based on the VMware platform. The previous physical host servers were a mix of PentiumD 2.80Ghz and PentiumD 2.66Ghz processors, drawing upwards of 0.60amps. Anymore than 8 virtual machines on these units would kill any hint of performance.
The latest machine to go in, which replaced a 2.66Ghz PentiumD, is a Core2Duo E6600 running at 2.40Ghz/1066FSB. Drawing 0.27amps at idle - its drawing the same as my old 800Mhz Celeron server running Cacti! Its got the same model RAM and hard disks in as the 2.66Ghz PentiumD - however im seeing 75-80% greater performance even with 14 virtual servers running!
Well done Intel… I really can’t wait to try the Quad Core versions.
Well this is it… my first (and hopefully last) blog. Most of my friends and family have at some point started blogging and on at least one occasion suggested I do the same. I’ve until now been stubborn (yes, me of all people) and flat refused. Anyhow, after much persuasion I’ve finally decided to give it a go.
My name is Robert Bentley as the URL of this blog suggests, and I am the founder of SynergyWorks. SynergyWorks is a web hosting company based in London Docklands. Most of my time is spent checking and double checking that everyones services are up and running. I do take time off every now and again, mainly when my girlfriend, Samantha, forces me to… however I make sure my trusty Windows Mobile is synchronised with Exchange incase that all important critical support ticket comes in!