Since my last entry about my new computer, I’ve added a blue cold cathode which is positioned vertically so it shines into the main part of the case, and also through the transparent 120mm fan behind the front panel, which saves on having to replace it with an LED fan which also means I can turn off the cold cathode and there’ll be no light to keep me awake.

As I wrote in my last entry, I wanted to have 2 hard drives hooked up so I could dual-boot between XP and Vista. With the Enermax PSU I bought I am able to have both drives connected and I can dual-boot just as I wanted. I still use XP as my main OS, Vista is mainly for DirectX 10 compatible games and to gain experience in using it.

I have also bought a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB which has eSATA and USB 2.0 connectors. I will be using eSATA once I get a cable as it doesn’t come with one unfortunately, so it’s currently hooked up by USB. eSATA is much faster than USB, eSATA can transfer at 300MB/s and USB 2.0 can only manage a measly 40MB/s.

I have installed and set up 2 scheduled backup tasks using Acronis TrueImage 11 Home. It’ll do a full backup once a month and an incremental backup every Sunday evening, of both hard drives. Considering my installation of XP has been going since October 2004, there are a LOT of personal files that I could not afford to lose. I started getting a little worried that my last full backup was a long time ago, and an entirely different computer ago as well, so I thought that a simple external drive would be by far the easiest way to perform the backups I want, instead of being spanned over a ton of DVDs.

UPDATE: I bought an eSATA cable, but for the life of me I cannot get the FreeAgent to work with it. After a bit of Googling, I don’t seem to be the only one having trouble with it. It also appears that Seagate have messed around with the firmware in the drive that severely reduces the speed of eSATA to almost the same as USB 2.0 – apparently to keep the noise to a bare minimum – so there is hardly any benefit to using it anyway! I wish I’d known that before I bought the drive, considering eSATA support was one of the major factors in my decision.