Today has brought some new toys to play with.
The first, and proudest for me, is a film scanner: a Minolta Dimage Scan Dual III. One of my co-workers has one (or perhaps, its baby brother), and it seemed to do a pretty good job with the images he showed me. I’ve been churning away at scanning negatives tonight, and I’ve been quite pleased! The thing has fully automatic loading and scanning for a complete filmstrip, along with many, many settings for multiple scans, color enhancement, etc., etc. It’s a very nice piece of gear, and is so very much faster than the Epson Perfection 2450 Photo flatbed scanner for the same task. Seems like the image resolution is better, too.
Of course, I’m no professional, and I have a strong sense of urgency to get my photos scanned and preserved, so I’m not scanning at the highest resolution — only about 940dpi, but that’s more than sufficient for what I need, and if I need to print something larger than 4×6, I can always scan selected images at higher resolution.
The other addition to my world has been some case goodies. I picked up an aluminum case (with a window), along with an Asus A7V8X and an Athlon XP 2100+. It’s a very nice setup, and is quite speedy. This processor is a Thoroughbred (as opposed to a Palomino), and runs very cool. Well, it had been running cool.
I picked up rounded cables for all the drives (floppy, 3 fdd, 1 cdr, 1 dvd), along with a lighted fan for the fdd’s (to replace a regular ol’ black one), a 92mm fan for the processor complex, and some UV lights for inside the case. I still don’t have the UV’s mounted, but everything else is in place. And, the processor temperature went from 87f to 95f! Essentially, I didn’t change anything from a cfm standpoint on the fans, and should’ve actually increased the airflow with the rounded cables. I did move the cdr and dvd higher in the case, and I wonder if that is somehow fouling up the airflow. Pure voodoo, this cooling is, and trial and error seems to be the only method for getting things right. Guess I have a little work ahead of me!