If you already have CCC installed I am guessing you already have installed the latest version of the .NET framework.

Programs you will need to download & install:
Driver Cleaner Pro
CCleaner
SuperShell
(optional) Latest ATI/AMD CCC Drivers

1. Remove the drivers using the ATI Software Uninstall Utility.
2. It will ask you to restart the system, restart but go into safemode.
3. Login to a administrator account.
4. Start Driver Cleaner Pro and select " Select multiple cleaning filters"
Add these to the list: "ATI , ATI CCC , ATI Uninstall Utility , ATI WDM"
Click Start to clean.
5. Run CCleaner & do a registry check (to check for registry links to removed files).
Select Fix All to fix the errors.
6. Now you will need to run supershel.exe
Once in the shell, run regedit
Now go to HKLM/Software/
Remove ATI & ATI Technologies
Now everything should be clean.
7. Reboot into windows as you usually would and install the required ATI/AMD CCC drivers.

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I looked around and decided the samsung spinpoint drives looked pretty good. I never really saw my Seagate 7200.10 320Gb as being slow and had it setup so each OS had 100Gb. Obviously as time has gone on the partitions have started to fill up.

On first powering on the Samsung I noticed straight away the drive was very quiet. On copying data it seemed quicker and even general usage seemed quicker.
To be sure, I decided to benchmark it against my Seagate and I was amazed to see the difference between the two drives.

The Samsung seems to be running 10°C cooler than the Seagate and is a lot quieter.
The Samsung also shows a huge improvement over the Seagate in the benchmarks, running over 100MB/s faster than the Seagate.

I benchmarked both drives on the same system and the same windows install/boot (installed on the Samsung). Both drives are running on the Intel(R) 82801GR/GH SATA AHCI Controller (ICH7).

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One thing which seems to be annoying with OS X is the way the mouse always seems to have acceleration. I had to enable acceleration on 1 in the drivers to get good movement back in the mouse.
Before these drivers I had tried steermouse and other applications, but none really made the mouse respond in the right way.

The movement on OS X is greatly enhanced with the changing of the dpi and frequency. 1800dpi @ 1000hz is a vast improvement.

Previous to this mouse I was using the Razer Diamondback with the Razer Pro|Click drivers (as they seem to be the same mouse, even down to having the same hardware ID's).

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I was told archlinux was one of the best upcoming ones. The more I read about it, the more I liked it. It sounded very similar to slackware (a distro I used to use as my main OS from 2000 to 2002 - before gentoo).

The install was very easy, I'd say it was basically the same as slackware was all those years ago. No pointless graphical rubbish, and it installed a nice base system to build everything else onto.
Installing & configuring xorg was very simple due to the package manager (pacman) & the fact the packages are in a compressed .tar.gz archive (like slackware). I installed openbox to get a higher resolution (640x480 looks horrid on a 1080i 24" screen) & continue the installation of gtk, gnome, xfce, fonts etc.

I am really pleased so far with archlinux. It boots 2xfaster than gentoo and the performance is a lot better than ubuntu. So far it seems like it's got the speed of gentoo and the ease of ubuntu. Everything is working as it should and there are no hours of compiling needed when installing stuff.

Here's my openbox desktop so far.

The memory usage is very low and the desktop is nice and responsive.

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So, the idea was to install gentoo (stage3) as it should be nice and fast.
After a night of compiling the kernel, xorg & gnome it was ready to go.

Everything was going well until I decided to install compiz. Then things started going slow and seemed buggy (window decorations were completely messed up). After hours of trying different ways of implementing compiz & getting random results, I decided to give up as who needs all those fancy effects?.

After thinking about it, I thought why not drop gnome as a desktop and go for something a bit more lightweight and faster. So I installed blackbox, fluxbox & openbox. All was going well, I had openbox running with conky and pypanel.
Then I thought I'd just try a OpenGL app and it segfaults.
I thought ok, I'll see if DRI is working (it was previously) & check if the system is using the right OpenGL & drivers.

~ $ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: No
~ $ glxinfo | grep renderer
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon X1900 Series
$ fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon X1900 Series
OpenGL version string: 1.4 (2.1.7412 Release)

Arg!! ok, lets try re-installing the drivers... No difference .. lets try checking the xorg log file ...

# cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep fglrx | grep -i DRI
(II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers//fglrx_drv.so
(II) fglrx(0): board/chipset is supported by this driver (original ATI board)
(II) fglrx(0): 1. 500/594MHz @ 0Hz [enable load balancing, overdrive]
(II) fglrx(0): 2. 398/594MHz @ 0Hz [enable load balancing, overdrive]
(II) fglrx(0): 3. 621/720MHz @ 0Hz [overclocked, enable load balancing, overdrive]
(==) fglrx(0): NoDRI = NO
(==) fglrx(0): OpenGL ClientDriverName: "fglrx_dri.so"
(II) fglrx(0): driver needs X.org 7.1.x.y with x.y >= 0.0
(II) fglrx(0): doing DRIScreenInit
(II) fglrx(0): [drm] created "fglrx" driver at busid "PCI:5:0:0"
(II) fglrx(0): DRIScreenInit done
(II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module version matches driver.
(II) fglrx(0): DRI initialization successfull!
(II) fglrx(0): [DRI] installation complete
(II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib64/dri/fglrx_dri.so

No problems there .... hmm

After another few hours of messing around I was unable to get DRI back.
So far - Compiz doesn't work properly & now the drivers have lost DRI.

Moving on to ALSA (thought I will come back to it later - clear mind sometimes helps) well ALSA was as easy as it always has been, ran up the config, un-muted the mixer and wow it worked. So lets get some MP3's from the NTFS partition - try to mount and it says "device already mounted or busy" hmm.. check mtab and it isn't mounted at all. Ok lets try the VFAT partition (on the same drive) ... I get exactly the same.

So now, compiz is buggy, DRI is not working anymore & neither FAT32 or NTFS drives are mounting due to something blocking access to the drive.

Time to give up tbh, compiling has taken hours, configuring has taken almost as much time & fault finding has taken even longer!!!.

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I'm starting to feel old as it's my 27th Birthday today.

It seems like 30 it getting closer, but I still live as if I'm young.
I am living on the basis of being 18 till I die, altho I'm not sure how long I can keep it up.

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I have tried most of the other mediaplayers (except amaroK as I'm on Gnome I don't want to install loads of KDE-Libs).
Out of the programs I've tried for playing and organising my MP3's, it is about the best.

To install the latest version of banshee on Ubuntu 8.04 all you need to do is edit the sources.list and add the banshee source, update the sources and the install "banshee-1"

sudo nano -w /etc/apt/sources.list
add:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/banshee-team/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/banshee-team/ubuntu hardy main
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install banshee-1

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You can download my conky config here.
You just need to have conky installed with dependencies and lm-sensors setup with the modules (coretemp for cpu).

The setup is a bit boring and blank atm as I've only just installed the base system.

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After trying a few wordpress plugins, I decided to customise the best one and after some editing I think it looks quite nice and fitting with the site.

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I love razer mice and decided on the deathadder as the size and shape of the lachesis is smaller than the diamondback and also seems to have a lot of bad press with all the bugs and overall shape/design. I have had razer mice since 1999 when I bought one of the first Boomslang 1000's (I still have it in original packaging and a CoA showing it is one of the first). I admit, I have had a logitech mx500 and a microsoft intelli v3 before I got my diamondback, but overall I think razer mice are pretty superior.

So far the Deathadder seems amazingly accurate and responsive.

I have now finished writing my review, so for more information please have a read.

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