Check Out My Utterly Unscientific Test Of My New Solid State Drive, The OCZ Vertex 3

So I purchased this drive a few weeks back and I'm pretty much as in love with a piece of computer hardware as I ever have been.

I built this machine piece by piece over a period of approximately 3 months and am proud of the rig I built.

A while back one of the old platter drives that just happened to be my system drive died.

I had to buy a new drive right?  What reasons exist in this world that new system drive shouldn't be an SSD?  Exactly, none.

So here's the video of my rebooting my computer...well, let me show you my system specs first:

A cursory glance at my system and what I'm running.

Obviously I am going to up that 8GB of RAM to 16GB. It's cheap enough for even the best RAM out there.

I could also upgrade the video card, at some point.  But right now I basically play Half Life 2 and its episodes when I even do play games.  But once my estranged "wife" allows me to have my clothing and other personal belongings that have been held hostage for just approaching a year now, I will be upgrading that card and buy a few of the newer games out there...namely Bioshock's latest. And I'm hoping for a new Bad Company title.

These games may have already been announced but I am very much out of the loop.

I've always loved Bioshock and have never, ever been let down.  There also must be another Bad Company game coming soon, unless I've missed it (PLEASE tell me if I have), that I will also purchase as one of my modern favorite games alongside the Bioshocks.  But that all depends on when my "wife" deems me worthy to have some of my items back.

So, without further ado here is the video that I have uploaded to Youtube to leave it open for comments, suggestions and criticism.


Soon, I'll be outlining the tweaks I have done to the drive and to Windows in order to get the best of an incredible drive.

I still believe I have some more tweaks to do but this is rather impressive.

AMD Video Drivers Windows Automatic Update

This tip isn't exactly rocket surgery, but it's still something that I've really learned to love.

AMD has a program that automatically checks your video card drivers against the latest driver release and notifies you if there's an available update.

AMD Driver Autodetect makes updating your video drivers seamless and even easier than it's ever been.

You can simply download it and run it whenever you want, but I'm all about saving mouse-clicks and shortcuts.  I have the file stored in my "C:\Program Files (x86)\" directory.  Then I created a shortcut to it and placed that shortcut in my Quick Launch directory.

By the way, if you're new to Windows 7 and you're wondering where that Quick Launch directory disappeared to, you can find it buried in:

C:\Users\Your User Name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

So, right click your taskbar, go to "Toolbars" and where it used to be in Windows XP you now need to select "New Toolbar".  Once you select that, navigate to the above path.  Then you'll have your  Quick Launch bar into which you should then place the shortcut to the AMD application.

My Windows 7, 64-bit Ferrari 599 GTO 

I simply click it once a week and I'm always up to date, driverwise. I like that word. Driverwise.

Download the file here.

Right Click To Find Wallpaper Exact Location

If you're like me, you appreciate a good wallpaper. You may also be using Windows 7's built in rotation application.  If you don't know about that, go drive around for a little bit.

I have a huge wallpaper collection and rotate them out every 24 hours.  Sometimes one comes up that I really like and had always wanted to find that image in my huge collection so that I could rate it...with the idea that I would create a collection of my favorite/highest rated pictures.

Trouble was that the collection of images was so cast, it was nearly impossible to find that exact image.

Then I came across a cool trick (hat tip to winhelponline.com) that gave me the extreme power to right click an empty area on my desktop, choose "Desktop Background File Location" and watch as Windows Explorer open up and beeline itself right to the directory and highlight the picture.

I could then tag it with my 1-5 star rating and smile and my monitor.

If you would like to join me in this epicness, download WPTargetDir.zip and extract it to a directory of your choosing. I used my C:\Program Files (x86) directory just so that my download directory doesn't get cluttered. You really shouldn't use your desktop, My Documents or the built in Downloads directories for storing stuff...it'll slow down the computer.  Good housekeeping, in my opinion is to create folders in C:\ and then create a library pointing to it.  Those other directories should just be used as staging areas.

Anyway...move the file 'WPTargetDir.vbs' into C:\Windows.  Then just double click 'add.reg' to add the keys to your registry.  Make sure you don't back up your registry first in case something goes wrong, you want to make sure you lose all your data.

Then check it out:

You can always thank me...if you're so inclined:

My life is shit so it's worth a shot, eh?

Some Awesome Windows Tips & Tricks

Copying and pasting is a pain in the ass.  Open two Windows Explorer instances, navigate to each folder, grab a bunch of files and drag and drop them across into the other window.  That sucks, but it sucks even more if all you're doing is moving one single small file.  Yeah, you could just press cut, then paste...but that's still a bunch of unnecessary mouse clicks.

How about simply highlighting the file or files you want to move, right clicking on them and selecting either "Copy To" or "Move To", then just using the menu system to find the folder, click ok and be all done?  It's about a tenth of the time and I don't know how I lived without it:

First, press start, go to Run, type "Regedit".  Back up your registry by going to "File > Export".  Save it somewhere in case something goes wrong (it shouldn't, these are pretty simple) and then click these two files to add them to your menu:

Copy To
Move To

Like I said, this make moving files around so much easier, I don't know how I lived before having these options.  Now that you've added them, simply go to a directory like "My Documents" or something and right click a file.  You'll notice the two extra options there for you.  You love me, it's ok.