Friday, May 19, 2006 - Posts

Eclipse + Mod for Subaru Liberty completed!

I picked up my Subaru Liberty from GL Pro Sound today after living in misery without it for 3 days (no car == no where to go == no life). I havent taken photo's or anything yet (apart from shots the guys there) but let me say they've made the car's interior so much sexier than it used to be.

Modification Summary
  • Installed the Eclipse AVN6000 Satnav in the cubby-hole.
  • Installed Rockford Fosgate Amplifier
  • Installed MBQuart Speakers
  • Moved the onboard computer display to the bottom, underneath the AC Console - where the cigarette lighter/thingy used to be. This part alone looks *AWESOME* and almost natural.
Firstly the Eclipse AVN6000 is *AWESOME* I spent a good hour or so in the car (idling) messing around with the Nav, Radio & Video and couldnt get enough of the touch-screen! Played a few DVDs (Matrix, Romeo Must Die & Shrek) which looked(and sounded stunning). On the way back the navigation system guided me home which was comforting. Anyhow a full review in the coming weeks posted on Techwarelabs.

I'll post pictures this weekend, i'm overloaded with university ASSignments that need starting;-) Bravo to the GL Pro Sound guys, minus the small scratches near the cubby-hole when installing the SatNav (which will be fixed on Wednessday) everything was beautifully done!

24/05 - EDIT: Added Photo's to Flickr a little late;-)
Yep uploaded some pictures of the modifications and the car in general to Flickr

Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor Released

Vista brings a whole new ball game to the Windows crowd, will your system be able to handle it? Is it strong enough, inteligent enough, juiced-up enough or quite simply good enough to stand against this new generation of operating systems? Well find out with the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor (currently Beta - Caused a BSoD while I was writing this!)

With all the options selected (so its checking for Windows Vista Ultimate) I found my main desktop (summary specs below) are (surprise!) adequate, however it didnt detect my HD Tuner (DViCo HDTuner) and didnt like the drivers for my HP Printer (which work on Vista builds now!), granted my main box is grunty I am running an older (but DX9 compatible) gfx card and quite an old sound card... anyhow see what your machine racks up.

System Summary
  • CPU: Intel 3.8Ghz (ES) [ Waiting for Conroe to move over to DC! ]
  • Motherboard: ASUS P5WD2-Premium
  • RAM: 2x 1GB Corsair 8000UL DDR-II = 2Gb Total
  • Hard Disk 1: 2x Western Digital Raptor 150Gb (SATA) RAID 0 [ Not Clear Cover ]
  • Hard Disk 2: 2x Western Digital WD5000YS 500Gig SATA II (RAID 0)
  • Video: Sapphire X850XT PE (Before the current Generation of 1xxx Series!)
  • Audio: Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum (not ZS, model before that)
Everyone should try and get a copy of Beta 2 (soon!) and try it on their machines to see how it will be running on your current setup, with the various builds I'm using at startup (with quite a bit of tweaking) I've got ~500Mb of memory already allocated to Vista. This means we're looking at an "atleast" 1Gb limit for most average users (which isnt that bad considering how far we've come)< My plan is to move over to 64Bit fulltime with atleast 4Gb of system memory to make things work nicely once Vista RTMs.