{"id":787,"date":"2003-09-13T10:42:00","date_gmt":"2003-09-13T09:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/2003\/09\/13\/a-case-in-point\/"},"modified":"2003-09-13T10:42:00","modified_gmt":"2003-09-13T09:42:00","slug":"a-case-in-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/2003\/09\/13\/a-case-in-point\/","title":{"rendered":"A case in point"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(Reminder to self&#8230; stop trying to make puns for Subject line.)<\/p>\n<p>Well, let&#8217;s see. What unexciting things have I been up to this week?<\/p>\n<p>Well, work&#8217;s mostly involved dull and boring things purely getting things ready for the new term such as spending 2 days trying to get quotes for consumables. Yes, it took 2 days to get proper prices out of 3 firms, all because they wanted to beat the others on price. Maybe it is a good idea to find the cheapest supplier, but I could have saved a whole load of time, and hence to the department almost as much money they&#8217;ve been paying me for that time, as I saved on cheaper prices by merely going to the first supplier.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and the rest of the week was spent creating new accounts and updating software. On that front I&#8217;ve still got KDE to update in the next week.<\/p>\n<p>Other than this, I&#8217;ve had a couple of nights of extremely poor sleep patterns and met Kat and her boyfriend Stu in the King&#8217;s Arms last night.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, I finally decided that I needed to replace my current PC case with one which is better at removing heat and is quieter. So, in the afternoon I went onto the Scan web site where I&#8217;d seen the Thermaltake Xaser III models which had had good reviews. Amongst other things they have a front panel with a temperature read-out and fan speed control knobs. As always, I looked on the &#8220;Today Only&#8221; page and saw that they were selling off SCSI CDROM drives stupidly cheap. eg. The Toshiba 32x one I went for was \u00a311.16 (yes, that&#8217;s not a typo!).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, to cut a long story short, &#8216;cos I couldn&#8217;t find a way to get special delivery (to get Saturday delivery) on the items using the web interface I phoned them up and ordered those two items and 256MB of PC100 memory for the iMac.<\/p>\n<p>At 8:15am this morning the whole lot arrived in a yellow and green Initial City Link van. Pretty good service, I&#8217;d say. Still, I did pay \u00a315 extra for the priviledge.<\/p>\n<p>My first impressions of the PC case are as follows:-<\/p>\n<h3>Good points<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Looks pretty good.<\/li>\n<li>Has lots of fans which are controllable.<\/li>\n<li>IDE cable management buit in.<\/li>\n<li>Nifty no-screw PCI card fixings.<\/li>\n<li>Nice, screwless drive fixing mounts.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Bad points<\/h3>\n<h3>\n<ul>\n<li>The aluminium is rather thin and flimsy. I&#8217;d have expected sturdier stuff from an expensive case.<\/li>\n<li>The fans are fitted but each has a big power connector on their cables and all the connections are left dangling so that the purchaser has to do all the wiring up. I&#8217;d have thought that Thermaltake would have kitted the case out with a wiring loom with all the fans attached to their fan control front panel. It wouldn&#8217;t have taken much to do.<\/li>\n<li>The side panel is a sod to get off. There&#8217;s been no real thought in the engineering concerning this.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In Thermaltake&#8217;s defence, the basic chassis is one they&#8217;ve bought in and modified. Still, for such an expensive case, \u00a3111, I would have thought they would have at least connected up all the equipment they put into it rather than leaving all the wires dangling horribly. I&#8217;m going to have to get some cable tie pads to stick around the thing. I may even get some sound deadening matterials for the sides and top so as to stop the thin aluminium from drumming.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Reminder to self&#8230; stop trying to make puns for Subject line.) Well, let&#8217;s see. What unexciting things have I been up to this week? Well, work&#8217;s mostly involved dull and boring things purely getting things ready for the new term &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/2003\/09\/13\/a-case-in-point\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1Kvvs-cH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}