KOFgokuon

Hey all
My previous set of speakers was a Klipsch promedia 4.1 set. I used this set through college and the first year of grad school, but at the last party that I threw at my apartment...the DIN connecting the control pod to the subwoofer basically melted and snapped. Tried to get it fixed via a vendor on ebay, but he replaced the DIN and it still didn't work, so I just dumped the speakers.

Thus, I need new ones! I've been doing some research online, and it seems that there really haven't been that many spectacular sets of speakers that have come out in the last few years. Every time I look for articles on "best 2.1 computer speakers" or "new 4.1 computer speakers" there aren't really any hits that come up from the last 2 years or so. Checked pcmag.com, pcworld.com, and a couple of other forums and it seems that the products available just aren't that innovative.

Thus, it looks like I might buy an older product, or look at a completely new alternative. First choice would be 2.1 vs 4.1/5.1. I usually use these speakers for listening to music / throwing parties (so having good bass is pretty important), but I also use them for gaming (I really only play starcraft, dota, and random webgames. Probably SC2 and D3 when they come out though). Poker too, but that doesn't require anything in terms of speaker power. I think 2.1 is probably the way to go because my room isn't that well setup for surround sound, I have to put all of the speakers on my desk to avoid having cables being lying all over the place.

Another option for me to look at would be buying floor speakers and an amplifier and hooking it up to my computer. Does anyone have any experience doing something like that? Would it be difficult? I would imagine that I have to buy some sort of adapters to make sure that everything fits in together, do these cause a large drop in quality?

Finally, I've looked at a couple of products in particular. Does anyone have a set of the Logitech z-2300 2.1's? They seem to be pretty well regarded. Another set that I've seen recommended is the Aego M's. Anyone seen that set?

I don't want to spend TOO too much (picked up saying this from Artosis' casts) money on this, but my price range is around $150-$250 or so, pretty flexible because I'm saving like $3200 on housing this semester because I'm abroad so I have money to play with.

Thanks guys, any help would be appreciated!

So I just finish giving my thesis proposal
..............
Pass with flying colors. It was strange, the proposal actually turned more into a conversation about my project than a formal presentation. The professors asked questions a lot, but they also just talked amongst themselves discussing ideas and approaches for the project. I was pretty relaxed throughout the whole thing, and it definitely went well. A few things I have to change, and a few ideas were mentioned for slightly different directions, but overall, a success

Time relax!

Tomorrow's one of the more important days for me of the past 5 years. I give my thesis proposal tomorrow to my thesis committee, and they can either pass me and I'm good to do research for the next 4 years, or they can fail me and it's back to the drawing board, which would fucking BLOW. For those who don't know (probably most), I'm a Ph.D. student at MIT in Chemical Engineering so it's a pretty intense process, definitely not a cake walk.

Wish me luck, judgment day begins at 11:00 AM

To all Americans: Happy Thanksgiving! Everyone enjoy your day of eating way too much turkey, hanging out with family/friends, and watching football all day!

What are you guys all doing?
I flew home this morning, I'm currently getting ready for lunch, and then a 20 lb turkey...for a 6 person dinner tonight! It's gonna be fantastic, so many leftovers!!!!

Everyone have fun this weekend!

I've had a lot of time to waste while in lab recently and I'm looking for some fun webgames to play while in lab.

Here's a couple that I have to share
http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bells.htm
Basically, just bounce the rabbit from bell to bell and get a higher and higher score
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/snowcraft
classic game that i've been playing for years, I don't think I've ever beaten it though
http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/Game.asp
very simple tower defense, similar to line tower wars or other UMS games in WC3 or SC

What other games do you play?

then it is officially not my fault. My absentee ballot is in the mail, my vote is for Barack Obama, and here's to Delaware's 3 electoral votes going blue!

As an aside, GO PHILLIES
Cole Hamels FTW

Well it's official, in the Eastern standard time zone I'm officially 24 years old.

I must say, it's pretty underwhelming. Once you reach 21, birthdays are actually kind of boring, nothing all that special happens. When I turn 25, I'll be able to pay less for my car insurance, though I'm an infrequent driver so my rate is pretty low anyways. Beyond this, there's nothing really all that exciting, primarily depressing birthdays until I get old enough for social security.

Now that I'm 24, it really brings into perspective a couple of things. I'm pretty much at the peak of my athletic prowess, and more or less it's all downhill from here. BRILLIANT.

Birthday plans: go into lab and do lab work, I have a birthday dinner planned with a small group of friends, and after that I'll probably hang out with a couple and watch a movie. My girlfriend is currently in Minnesota and will be there until next weekend, so it'll be a somewhat lonely night spent doing work (ugh) in my apartment. It's sad, but I'm getting too old to go out and hit the bars. Even 1 hardcore night at the bars takes a full day of sleep and rest to fully recover.

Either way, should be a relaxing birthday. The next in a line of non-interesting and pretty much uneventful birthdays until 65 ><

The Problem:
I bought my computer about a year ago from cyberpowerpc, and it's been running completely fine up to now. The past few days, it's been having trouble connecting to the internet, and then suddenly my network card pretty much stopped connecting completely to the internet. After that, I started getting a lot of random "blue screen of death" type occurrences. When I can manage to restart my computer, I can open the c: drive and d: drive, but opening programs takes a lot longer than it should (30+ seconds or so)

Potential problems: The internet problem seems to be the internal network card on my motherboard being dead. For some reason, the motherboard that the computer came with doesn't have drivers for Windows Vista (briliant idea to pack it with Vista, yea?)...I had to reformat my computer once, I'll be honest I don't really remember how I got it to work again last time. Also, I generally don't turn my computer off, so it's been running for a significant fraction of the time that I've owned it. I have multiple fans in the case, and there's a temperature gauge on the front panel so it's not overheating or anything.

If I can keep my computer on for long enough, I'm going to run some memory tests on it to make sure my RAM isn't bad. Other than that, and reinstalling drivers, can you give any more advice (other than install XP or buy a mac or useless stuff like that)? I'll buy a new mother board if I have to, but it'd be a huge pain to take everything out and put it all back in, there's a lot of shit plugged into my motherboard and case right now

Thanks TL

Here's the computer specs:


Case: Raidmax Sagitta Mid-Tower 420W Gaming Case w/ Side Panel Window
CPU: AMD Athlonâ„¢64 X2 6000+ Dual-Core CPU w/ HyperTransport Technology
CD: 18X DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE DUAL LAYER (BLACK COLOR)
CD2: SONY 16X DVD-ROM (BLACK COLOR)
Fan: AMD ATHLON64 CERTIFIED CPU FAN & HEATSINK
Floppy: 1.44 MB floppy drive
Hard drive: Extreme Performance (RAID-0) with 2 Identical Hard Drives (320GB

(160GBx2) SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 8MB Cache 7200RPM HDD
Memory: (Req.DDR2 MainBoard)1GB (2x512MB) PC6400 DDR2/800 Dual Channel Memory

(Corsair Value Select or Major Brand)
and
DDR2 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400 800MHz / Non-ECC CL5 / 240-pin / Unbuffered DIMM /

Kingston KVR800D2K2/2GR
Video card: BFG GeForce 7900 GS OC 256MB PCI Express®
Sound card: some sound blaster sound card
Motherboard: (Socket AM2)MSI K9N4 SLI-F nForce 500 SLI Chipset DDR2/800 SATA-II

RAID MBoard w/ Dual 16x PCI-Express
OS: Vista
Power supply: 500 Watts Power Supplies Xion ATX Power Supply