1) Dance-Music.org -> Newsletter Bulletin Update 01 1st March 2009

As advertised on the website, here is the bulletin update and details of the technical hiccups which have unfortunately delayed the release of my forth coming album “Breaking The Rules”.

As always there is some free music at the bottom of this bulletin update.

2) “My Computers Broke!” -> Breaking The PC Album Update

Yes, as my usual good fortune would have it, a week before Christmas my computer started beeping and refused to boot up.

I opened the case to see what might be the problems and well stone me! My video card was mouldy!

Yep the back of the card was covered in that green fuzz circuit boards get when they are exposed to moisture.

That seemed odd I thought, I mentioned it to the missus and she seemed to look sheepish!

So I urged her to explain…

It seems a few month prior to this she had accidentally dropped an old cup of tea I had left on my desk and it had gone over my keyboard, screen and desktop speakers, or so she had thought.

She cleaned up the mess and thought nothing of it.

Little did she know that some must have dripped though the fan in the top of my case, but as the computer wasn't on at the time, it must have semi dried before I next used the PC as I find it amazing the PC continued to work for several months before finally dying on me.

I then had to spend the next 3-4 weeks buying components to establish the extent of the damage.

Firstly I bought a new GTX260 card, it didn't solve the problem, and I even had to send the card back as it was sold to me as a Maxcore 216 card, yet the box showed it as 192 cores.

So then a new GTX260 Maxcore 216 OCX card was purchased along with a new motherboard (Asus P5Q-WS), alas still the PC wouldn't work. So we then went and bought a new Q6600 Quad Core CPU, as we were running out of ideas as well as components to replace.

We assumed the memory was OK as I tried each individual 1gb stick on its own, surely even if some memory had gone not all 4 would be dead?

Alas the new CPU still made no difference. So I sent the motherboard back for analysis assuming it had been DOA.

The board was subsequently sent back to me as 'nothing wrong'. Hmmm so I put the PC back together again, yet still it wouldn't boot. So again I tried each stick of memory one at a time. Bingo!

After further trial, it seemed 1 stick of memory was definitely dead. It still didn't explain why the last time I tried them one at a time the PC refused to boot, and I am actually still using the original processor from the old board, so obviously the CPU was fine.

Finally I had a working PC but with only 3gb of memory. I tried to find another gig of memory to put it back to 4gb as I was going to be running Vista Ultimate x64, but they no longer made Cellshock PC8000 memory, dang the original 4gb cost me @ £350.00

So we then purchased 4gig of new OCZ Reaper HPC PC9200 (1150mhz) memory to finish the rebuild. Then to try and recoup some money we sold the spare CPU and the 3gb of Cellshock memory on eBay. The motherboard and video card went to the PC graveyard. R.I.P.

Then came time to load the operating system… little did we realise the Marvell IDE controller on the Asus motherboard doesn't work if you run the PCI-X 64bit 133mhz slot and Adaptec U320 SCSI hard disk configuration.

Luckily the mother board had SATA, so after seeking support through AsusTek, we established if a new SATA drive was installed, it should work as it doesn't use int13 for IDE devices.

This did solve the problem but at the expense of losing my CD Burner and DVD Burner that were IDE and after having to purchase a new SATA DVD RW drive!

Oh well at least I got a new copy of Nero Burning software with the new SATA drive, my old drive came with Nero 5 which didn't work on Vista so I was previously having to dual boot XP to burn CD's… every cloud I guess!

Then on top of all this my Tuniq tower CPU cooler thumb screw broke and a new CPU cooler had to be purchased, which incidentally is the Zalman CNSP9500A-LED, which I highly recommend.

All was not lost either, I now have a video card more powerful than my previous Geforce 8800GTX card, plus faster memory which I'm over clocking to 1200mhz , and with the new mother board and CPU cooler I'm able to over clock the CPU to 3.4ghz a full 1gig over clock from its standard 2.4ghz speed.

Oh a word of warning when installing Vista, as soon as the install is complete, go and get the standalone install of SP1 and install it manually and not via normal 'Widows Updates'. I spent 4 hours on remote support with Microsoft and two installs later to learn that Vista bug bare!

Well as you can imagine after all that, Christmas and January had come and gone and I hadn't had a chance to write a single note of new music for the album. I even had to wait a week to get a new unlock code for my audio sequencing software for which I have been a beta tester many years.

At last I'm hoping to work on the album for 2nd quarter 2009 and hope to be able to release “Breaking The Rules” as a summer 2009 album.

So until then, don't forget to enjoy the exclusive “Blending The Breaks” break beat DJ mix I've done to say sorry for the album delay.

1) Dance-Music.org -> Newsletter Bulletin Update 01 1st March 2009

2) “My Computers Broke!” -> Breaking The PC Album Update

Use the link below to download your free break beat mix.