标签: Z7

Not typical of me, I was not wearing my happy face several days ago, nor did I perform a single happy dance. The reason for this sad state of affairs started when I arrived at my office at the crack of dawn and powered up the main tower computer that drives the three 28-inch monitors forming my desktop.   Everything seemed to be OK at first. The various applications (Outlook, Firefox, Excel, Word, Visio, Notepad, etc.) appeared to open and run as expected while I was setting up my desktop the way I like it. As soon as I tried to do anything with any of these applications, however, that program immediately locked up. If I subsequently tried to use the ctrl-alt-delete key combination to access the task manager, the entire system locked up and then all three screens went black. Strange to relate, the only thing that continued to work was the lonely cursor associated with my mouse, and there’s not much you can do with a cursor on an otherwise blank screen.   I tried re-booting the machine several times to no avail. There were probably other things I could have tried, but I’d pretty much reached the end of the line. To be honest, this computer has been getting flakier and flakier recently, and I’ve been expecting this day to come for a few months now. We’ve run antivirus and anti-malware tools, and we’ve tried swapping memory sticks and running low-level diagnostic and intensive burn-in tests, but at the end of the day there’s only so much you can do.     I must admit to feeling a tad forlorn. This machine has been a true and faithful companion for several years now. It was actually a refurbished unit I purchased off eBay for around $350. The graphics card was a beast that could drive two high-resolution monitors. I soon discovered that a new card of the same type would have cost me around $450 (eek!), but then I tracked down a refurbished version on eBay for something like $30. Since that time, I’ve been working the poor little scamp into the ground, pounding away on my keyboard, orchestrating things with my mouse, creating blogs, editing images, and doing suchlike from dawn till dusk, day-in and day-out. I know how frazzled I feel, so I’m not surprised that my tower computer eventually gave up the ghost and shrugged off this mortal coil.   The thing is that I can’t survive without my big-boy computer. I can struggle along on my notepads – as I must do when I’m travelling -- but I can generate only a fraction of the throughput I manage on my primary setup. If you couple this with the fact that I am a man of little patience, who is not prepared to wait several days to obtain a new machine, you can see we have a problem.   Of course one can find computers at places like Best-Buy and Walmart, but these are pretty much generic boxes targeted at the masses. These machines may be OK for home use, but I haven’t had much luck over the years using them in a grueling professional environment.   Fortunately, I have a chum called Daniel Imsand who works at a local company called GigaParts . This is an interesting organization with two faces to it. On one hand it is the largest independent ham radio distributor in the USA (and possibly in the world). On the other it builds and sells kick-ass PCs. The GigaParts Zero Systems brand is divided into three categories: Zero Home PCs, Zero Gaming PCs, and Zero Workstations.   Daniel is the product manager for all of GigaParts' Zero Systems. He is tasked with creating custom configurations with great pricing boasting the most reliable and stable components. As Daniel told me, GigaParts includes parts and labor warranty -- three years for both on the machine I ended up purchasing from them. But, given a choice, it prefers not to have to do any warranty work, so the company designs and builds its machines in such a way that they keep going, and going, and …   A lot of GigaParts' computer business involves creating custom value-added systems that it builds to order. (Apparently it does a roaring trade in professional-grade flight simulators.) But it also offers prebuilt, off-the-shelf systems sufficient to make even a grizzled old engineer like me squeal with delight. (It was not a pretty sound.)   I called Daniel on the phone. Based on his recommendation, I settled on a Zero Pro Z7 Plus machine. This little beauty boasts a quad-core Intel Core i7-4790 processor running at 3.6 GHz (be still, my beating heart). This is augmented by 16GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, an enterprise-grade Intel Pro 2500 Series 240GB SSD (solid state drive), an nVidia Quadro K620 Workstation GPU, SuperSpeed USB 3.0, and more bells and whistles than you could swing a stick at.   One thing I really like is that the company offers this machine with Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit. (I have little regard for Windows 8 on my office machines.) As soon as I got off the phone with Daniel, I leapt into my truck and raced over to the GigaParts building. By the time I arrived, about 20 minutes later, my new machine, along with a bunch of HDMI cables and appropriate connectors, was sitting on the counter waiting for me. After undergoing a few formalities, like paying for the little scamp (thank goodness for credit cards, is all I can say), I zipped back to my office and commenced connecting everything together.     To be honest, after spending the past several months trying to keep my old machine gasping along, I've grown a little tired of crawling around under my desk, replacing parts and messing around with cables. Thus, I decided to locate this new machine on the top of my desk behind the monitors, as shown in the picture above.   I then spent the rest of the day downloading and/or reloading my various applications, like Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visio, Paint.net, and so forth. I also downloaded Mozilla Firefox, which is my preferred Web browser, and I made sure that Google.com is the default search engine that appears on the screen when I launch that browser.   Then the next day -- a brand spanking new day. Once again I'm wearing my happy face and all is now well in the Land of Max, where the colors are brighter, the butterflies are bigger, the birds sing sweeter, and the beer is plentiful and cold. I just powered up "the beast." OMG, this machine is so fast ! The password box appears on the center screen only a second or so after you've pressed the soft power button. As soon as you enter the password all three screens immediately spring to life. When I launch an application like Word or Excel, it appears on my screen in a flash. It's so fast, in fact, that I get the impression the program has launched before I've finished double-clicking its icon on my desktop.   Having said all this, I have run into one slight problem. I think this came about when I downloaded a new copy of the free PDFCreator utility that I've been using for years, but I can’t say for sure. All I know is that now, when I launch Firefox, I'm presented with the Google search engine on the initial tab, which is what I want. But if I subsequently click the '+' icon to open up a new tab, that tab appears with the loathsome Bing search engine flaunting itself in all its horrible glory. I've tried playing with the "options" settings, but for the life of me I can’t work out how to stop this from happening.   Are you aware of any problems associated with downloading PDFCreator, and do you have any ideas as to how I can banish the despicable Bing search engine back to the nether regions from whence it came?

Unusually for me, I was not wearing my happy face several days ago, nor did I perform a single happy dance. The reason for this sad state of affairs started when I arrived at my office at the crack of dawn and powered up the main tower computer that drives the three 28-inch monitors forming my desktop.   Everything seemed to be OK at first. The various applications (Outlook, Firefox, Excel, Word, Visio, Notepad, etc.) appeared to open and run as expected while I was setting up my desktop the way I like it. As soon as I tried to do anything with any of these applications, however, that program immediately locked up. If I subsequently tried to use the ctrl-alt-delete key combination to access the task manager, the entire system locked up and then all three screens went black. Strange to relate, the only thing that continued to work was the lonely cursor associated with my mouse, and there’s not much you can do with a cursor on an otherwise blank screen.   I tried re-booting the machine several times to no avail. There were probably other things I could have tried, but I’d pretty much reached the end of the line. To be honest, this computer has been getting flakier and flakier recently, and I’ve been expecting this day to come for a few months now. We’ve run antivirus and anti-malware tools, and we’ve tried swapping memory sticks and running low-level diagnostic and intensive burn-in tests, but at the end of the day there’s only so much you can do.     I must admit to feeling a tad forlorn. This machine has been a true and faithful companion for several years now. It was actually a refurbished unit I purchased off eBay for around $350. The graphics card was a beast that could drive two high-resolution monitors. I soon discovered that a new card of the same type would have cost me around $450 (eek!), but then I tracked down a refurbished version on eBay for something like $30. Since that time, I’ve been working the poor little scamp into the ground, pounding away on my keyboard, orchestrating things with my mouse, creating blogs, editing images, and doing suchlike from dawn till dusk, day-in and day-out. I know how frazzled I feel, so I’m not surprised that my tower computer eventually gave up the ghost and shrugged off this mortal coil.   The thing is that I can’t survive without my big-boy computer. I can struggle along on my notepads – as I must do when I’m travelling -- but I can generate only a fraction of the throughput I manage on my primary setup. If you couple this with the fact that I am a man of little patience, who is not prepared to wait several days to obtain a new machine, you can see we have a problem.   Of course one can find computers at places like Best-Buy and Walmart, but these are pretty much generic boxes targeted at the masses. These machines may be OK for home use, but I haven’t had much luck over the years using them in a grueling professional environment.   Fortunately, I have a chum called Daniel Imsand who works at a local company called GigaParts . This is an interesting organization with two faces to it. On one hand it is the largest independent ham radio distributor in the USA (and possibly in the world). On the other it builds and sells kick-ass PCs. The GigaParts Zero Systems brand is divided into three categories: Zero Home PCs, Zero Gaming PCs, and Zero Workstations.   Daniel is the product manager for all of GigaParts' Zero Systems. He is tasked with creating custom configurations with great pricing boasting the most reliable and stable components. As Daniel told me, GigaParts includes parts and labor warranty -- three years for both on the machine I ended up purchasing from them. But, given a choice, it prefers not to have to do any warranty work, so the company designs and builds its machines in such a way that they keep going, and going, and …   A lot of GigaParts' computer business involves creating custom value-added systems that it builds to order. (Apparently it does a roaring trade in professional-grade flight simulators.) But it also offers prebuilt, off-the-shelf systems sufficient to make even a grizzled old engineer like me squeal with delight. (It was not a pretty sound.)   I called Daniel on the phone. Based on his recommendation, I settled on a Zero Pro Z7 Plus machine. This little beauty boasts a quad-core Intel Core i7-4790 processor running at 3.6 GHz (be still, my beating heart). This is augmented by 16GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, an enterprise-grade Intel Pro 2500 Series 240GB SSD (solid state drive), an nVidia Quadro K620 Workstation GPU, SuperSpeed USB 3.0, and more bells and whistles than you could swing a stick at.   One thing I really like is that the company offers this machine with Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit. (I have little regard for Windows 8 on my office machines.) As soon as I got off the phone with Daniel, I leapt into my truck and raced over to the GigaParts building. By the time I arrived, about 20 minutes later, my new machine, along with a bunch of HDMI cables and appropriate connectors, was sitting on the counter waiting for me. After undergoing a few formalities, like paying for the little scamp (thank goodness for credit cards, is all I can say), I zipped back to my office and commenced connecting everything together.     To be honest, after spending the past several months trying to keep my old machine gasping along, I've grown a little tired of crawling around under my desk, replacing parts and messing around with cables. Thus, I decided to locate this new machine on the top of my desk behind the monitors, as shown in the picture above.   I then spent the rest of the day downloading and/or reloading my various applications, like Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visio, Paint.net, and so forth. I also downloaded Mozilla Firefox, which is my preferred Web browser, and I made sure that Google.com is the default search engine that appears on the screen when I launch that browser.   Then the next day -- a brand spanking new day. Once again I'm wearing my happy face and all is now well in the Land of Max, where the colors are brighter, the butterflies are bigger, the birds sing sweeter, and the beer is plentiful and cold. I just powered up "the beast." OMG, this machine is so fast ! The password box appears on the center screen only a second or so after you've pressed the soft power button. As soon as you enter the password all three screens immediately spring to life. When I launch an application like Word or Excel, it appears on my screen in a flash. It's so fast, in fact, that I get the impression the program has launched before I've finished double-clicking its icon on my desktop.   Having said all this, I have run into one slight problem. I think this came about when I downloaded a new copy of the free PDFCreator utility that I've been using for years, but I can’t say for sure. All I know is that now, when I launch Firefox, I'm presented with the Google search engine on the initial tab, which is what I want. But if I subsequently click the '+' icon to open up a new tab, that tab appears with the loathsome Bing search engine flaunting itself in all its horrible glory. I've tried playing with the "options" settings, but for the life of me I can’t work out how to stop this from happening.   Are you aware of any problems associated with downloading PDFCreator, and do you have any ideas as to how I can banish the despicable Bing search engine back to the nether regions from whence it came?