Upgrades…

With the arrival of our new Panasonic HDC-SD9 (no, we didn’t pay the list price), it didn’t take long to realize that the old PC wasn’t going to cut it when it came to editing HD video clips. A single processor, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, with 3.5 GB of RAM running Vista and it struggled to create a 40 second HD WMV file at 540p. When I say struggled, i mean it took at least 45 minutes to write out this file. To make matters worse, it seemed like the video frames were played back in fast forward for 10 seconds, then froze on a frame, playing the audio at the real run rate. Needless to say, I wasn’t very pleased, however it did give me a reason to start to look at new PC’s.

The current situation at home is that I use the above mentioned PC, while Kim uses my dual 1.4 GHz G4 PowerMac, which is also getting a little long in the tooth. I wanted to retire both PC’s and go for a single solution that we could both use, hopefully selling the PowerMac for a low-ish price on Craig’s List to make up for some of the money spent on the new PC. My dad mentioned that Consumer Reports had just done a segment on PC’s in the print edition, and since Kim and I subscribe to the online version I was able to find the report easily. It looked like the best buy from CR would be a Dell 530s, mostly because we want to be able to do semi-advanced video editing (HD) and I enjoy the occasional game on the PC. After some customization of the 530s, we found that the price before taxes looked to be around $900, which wasn’t bad, but still a little steep, so we decided to sleep on it. The next day, after some faithful googling, I found some Dell Coupons online that could help us cut the price a little, with the best deal on the inspiron being $300 off any PC of $999 or more. The problem with this is that the PC I found maxed out around 900. Sure I could load it with other junk I didn’t want, but that’s no way to get the most “bang for the buck”. So I started over with a 530 (note the lack of “s” here) which is larger, including more room for customization. After loading this new PC up, I rolled away with a Quad Core Intel machine with 4GB of RAM, HD audigy sound card, and a Radeon HD 2600 XT. All of this came out to be $1094, which dropped to $794 leaving a final price of $841, which I consider a steal if there ever was one. Once we get all setup, i’ll see about posting some YouTube links to our videos.

Accidentally Deleted Partion…

One of those things you never want to do.  I have two drives in my PC, one 35GB drive and one 72 GB drive.  When I initially installed Vista, I erroneously installed on the smaller of the 2 drives.  As a byproduct of that mistake, I have to constantly monitor how much disk space I use and today I decided I would reinstall vista on the larger drive.  Since I bought the upgrade instead of the full version, I had to install XP first.  Meanwhile, I was trying to keep track of Josh and get ready to brew the Witbier, so I was multitasking. 

When the blue setup screen of windows came up, I decided to delete the old partitions and recreate them, and, at one point, I had split the larger drive into two smaller partitions.  So I thought to myself that I was cleaning up the partitions to create a solid drive that shouldn’t bother me about diskspace so much.  As soon as I deleted the third partition I froze, realizing what I had just done.  In a panic, I rebooted the PC, hoping that the partition table hadn’t been written to the disks, but I was too late.  Most of the data on that disk is purely backups from my PowerMac, but there was a small sliver that contained media from the windows install that I was redoing and it appeared to be long gone.

I knew the data was still there on the disk, but Windows couldn’t see it.  After some clever googling, I found TestDisk, an Open Source disk recovery tool, and decided to give it a shot, as I had nothing to lose.  To my surprise, it worked perfectly!  Quite user friendly (for a command line tool) and after a reboot, all 250GB of backed up data showed up on my drive. 

The lesson here?  Never partition drives unless you are paying attention to what you are doing… I got lucky, but it isn’t always that easy.