Welcome, on this page I plan to give various advice associated with personal computers. Hopefully you will see pages on desktop and laptop mods that I carry out as well as some general advice and I have also included general details about this interest and my degree so far.
Move straight on to the projects section of this page....
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My other hobby seems to be lived in computers, I study computer science at the
University of Essex and I have spent years before hand building and setting up many
different PC's. For those interested, at the moment I have a desktop
computer (pictured below) based on an AMD Athlon 3700 processor, with 1GB of RAM, an NVIDIA
7900 GT graphics card and other bits and bobs!
I've also been through a fair few laptops. Currently I'm using an old IBM T20 which has pretty much been upgraded to the maximum it can! The 700Mhz P3 gets me by though, and its small, light, has a long battery life and doesn't overheat like newer laptops I've had!
At Essex university, I was a member of the multiplayer gaming society (mgs), which now has a home page (http://www.mgsoc.co.uk). They organised LAN parties once in a while in which we all bring down computers and play multiplayer games over a fast network.
I have completed a computer science course at the University of Essex. This was a very varied
computer science degree, consisting of many different modules, those being in the first year:
Intro to Discrete Maths, Intro Computer Systems, Intro to Programming, Intro to Software Engineering, Intro to Robotics and Intelligent machines, Intro to Artificial Intelligence, Professional Development and Practice and Programming with Java.
And in the second year:
Group Project, Types and Object (Java), Object Oriented Programming (Java), Introduction to Databases, Operating Systems and Networks, Information Retreival and Visualisation, Embedded processors for robotics and robot programming.
And the final year:
Final Year Project, spanning the whole year, Interactive Computer Graphics, Advanced Object Oriented Programming, Software Analysis and Design, Mobile Robots, Middleware and Further Concepts in Databases
Most modules were interesting. Some very difficult and challenging too!
My degree taught me the ability to program. The programming courses used Java, which although I feel is not the best language it seems very powerful. If your are interested in programming, you can get the java development kit here and a very good tutorial here. I used to use a program to write the Java, called Text Pad, which is quite good, you can get that here, but I have moved on from text pad (which is great for learning how to program at first). I now use netbeans for Java, which is available on sun's java website.
These days I tend to do a lot of web development and programming, using ASP.NET or PHP with elements of HTML, Javascript and SQL. Since my company prefers it, my biggest expertise is in VB.NET, which shares some of the same object oriented programming model used in Java. I also do a lot of T-SQL, as part of OLAP database staging and building, along with Hyperion Essbase.
From all the stuff I learnt during the degree, I created my own java text based html editor.. it looks brilliant and I am still happy with it. Check out out by clicking the link further down this page...