n_maher

A week? Apple sent me an email this morning that seemed to indicate I could have it delivered to my door Friday if I wanted it.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and will certainly be watching the show if/when it starts. They didn't hit a homerun with it but given my expectations I'm not sure they could have.

It all depends on what you believe is required for calibration. I've become more and more convinced that most tube testers should be thoroughly gone through if you're going to bother. That means checking every resistor and capacitor (which may requiring some desoldering). This is what the guy who redid my 700 did, it's time consuming and a working knowledge of the device in addition to the tools and equipment portion. My tech's reasoning, which I agree with, is that otherwise you're simply calibrating the tester at a point in time and if you have components that are drifting the calibration that you just performed is essentially worthless. The 747 by virtue of it's SS design my be more immune to this than others but it's at least worth considering and deciding whether or not you (the buyer) feels comfortable with the end result.

Forrest. He and my little sister are getting married this Christmas.

Regina Spektor - Far

I just finished watching Wipeout and more specifically

Congrats! Even though it isn't everything that you were looking for hopefully you can make it so it feels like home.

What I don't understand is why you own a BHSE (that you currently let out on loan for the summer) and are looking at an older stax setup?

What, no XR-10B?

You f'ing kill me Stretch. The album name for that image is classic. I'm rather tempted to post that in Lawton's thread but I'm in "play nice" mode... for now.

No, but some of us have the whole series anyway...

You are unwise to bring up things like "visual equivalent" with this crowd.

Good call on the B&K, especially the 747. I'd start scouring the countryside for someone to calibrate it for you though. After looking into calibrating my own tester I started to realize that while simple enough at first glance, in order to do it and have it actually make a difference you really do need some specialized equipment. Too bad you're halfway around the globe, the guy I ended up tracking down is pretty reasonable if you can convince him to work on your gear.

I sure hope it provides more than 22db of attenuation and a greater range than that. Otherwise I don't quite get offering balanced inputs and only SE outputs. Otherwise I could do with, uh, 5 fewer front panel switches.

I've heard bad things about Dell's mini towers and their propensity for baking things. Thoughts?

I have a friend who works for m$ and own [2] OEM Vista Ultimate's as well as [2] unassigned OEM copies of Home Basic. The OS end of things should be covered just fine. Thanks for the rest of the advice Tom, I'm leaning towards tkam's config although probably tweaked just a bit to trim things down. I'm also leaning towards just tossing the old box entirely and not planning to use any of it.

Let me know when you get a hankering for a TD160.

Damn Todd, that's pretty sweet. Think it could be done substantially cheaper ($100 or so) with just a Core2Duo?

I've built my own computers before but usually after some pretty exhaustive research and that's the part I have no time/desire to do now. The physical assembly part is no big deal as you guys have said. The real problem is that it's been long enough since I did something like this that I don't even really know what I'm looking at anymore.

I'm pretty sure it can, yes. Ehhh, not really but it could do in a pinch. Mwave will assemble and test your config for free right now, I don't think I've seen anything like that on NewEgg.

I'd be happy to be into it for ~$500, less is of course better.

I'd like it to have enough oomph to run AutoCAD and a few other graphics programs that I use but they really aren't all that resource dependent. But that said I have a pretty strong aversion to buying a prebuilt box for better or worse. I also own a copy of Vista32 Home Basic as well as Office '07 so I should be able to trim most of the software expense out of this purchase.

So my home computer is dying. Well, it's more dead than dying but you get the picture. It's had a good life, some 8 years now, and just can't cope with even the most basic tasks anymore. After installing a fresh OS this weekend and having it struggle for an entire day just trying to auto-update it's become painfully clear that it's time to move on. Basically what I'm thinking about doing is picking up a pre-assembled motherboard/processor/ram bundle from someone like mwave and installing it in a chassis myself. But I don't have the time or patience required to research this stuff much these days so I figured I'd throw it out there and see if anyone has any great ideas. The budget for this is extremely limited unfortunately but thankfully it doesn't need that much in the way of processing power, can be semi-noisy, and I've got the monitor and peripherals taken care of already. And before someone suggests a MAC Mini I've looked into it and I'm not sure it's worth it to me to pay for that much size compression when it really doesn't matter to me. I'm pretty sure I can get a lot more power/$$ through other avenues.