So here I am, the proud owner of the aforementioned Epson All-in-One printer, replacing a tired HP K80. Dagnabbit! One of the things I print are Stomper CD/DVD labels. They’re die cut, two-up on a sheet, and there’s a tiny slit in the page adjacent to two tabs that let you lift the labels off the sheet.

The dilemma: The printer stops printing about an eighth of an inch from the bottom of the top label and shoots out the sheet with the rest of it blank.

Epson’s technical support would be comical if it wasn’t so clueless. Over the last three days it’s told me how to possibly resolve the problem for a different printer entirely and has just told me that the software I’m using is probably the culprit –even though it’s the same software -and hardware- I’ve been using for years on the K80.

So I started playing around a bit.

Click ‘n’ Design 3D V5 prints great to plain paper. Try to print the same template to a label sheet and, Shazaam!, it stops printing as previously described and spits out the sheet. That absolves the software. By golly! It’s something about the printer! Who’d have thunk!?!

Silly person that I am, I put some blue painter’s tape across the two slits in the label sheet and tried again. Shazaam! It prints the full sheet, two labels, just what I want! It’s a miracle! Well, all right, it’s probably a sensor in the feed path that, on seeing the gap in the label at the slits, stops printing so ink isn’t flying about willy-nilly.

Now comes the hard part. No, not putting blue tape over the slits whenever I try to print a CD/DVD label. The hard part will now be waiting for Epson’s reply on Friday and then trying to get them to tell me how to disable that sensor.

Do you wonder why I hate change?

Antec’s changing names again. This time the P190 has become the P190 +1200 –the latter referring to the Neo-Link 1200 watt power supply. (Apparently, some folk were confused as to the reason the house lights dimmed when they switched it on…)

This is a big case. Why do I say that? Because that’s an ASUS M3A32 MVP WiFi-AP Deluxe full-size motherboard in there and it’s pretty much dwarfed by the space you could possibly use. I’m thinking dual quad core server motherboards might be a better fit… (I had to move the motherboard standoffs two sections to the left.)

I’m at the beginning of construction here, with just the processor (yes, that’s a stock AMD cooling fan -the AM2+ socket wouldn’t fit anything I had on hand and it’s a holiday…), two hard drives (500GB on top, 1TB below in the top bank), and the Gigabyte Radeon HD 2600 Pro PCIe graphics card installed.

And that graphics card is one huge copper heatsink. You have to wonder: there’ll be no additional noise from the GPU fan (because there isn’t one) but how well will the heatsink do its job?

The surprising thing about the HD 2600 Pro (and if you think you’ve heard the name before this, check out an iMac config) is that its doesn’t have an HDMI port. I think the HD 2400GT spoiled me.

More as it goes along…

I’ve been transferring video from VHS to DVD for the past two weeks and have come upon some anecdotal data that I, at least, find interesting.

While watching a Doctor Who episode as I recorded it to my PC, I saw a commercial for a Who convention. There were a string of celebrities reportedly attending and, in that fleeting moment of whispy timelessness that sometimes happens when watching events out of context, I thought, “Hey, I should go.” That was before the announcer reminded me that the promo was for WhoCon86 (or some such name) which, of course, was scheduled for May of 1986.

So, I now had an approximate date for my Doctor Who video tapes -they were at least 20 years old.

Surprisingly, most were in pretty could condition. Sure, there were those that wiggled a bit, and a few that were absolutely over-exposed to the point of being painful to watch. But, by in large, the bulk of them were usable.

Now why would that be surprising? Well, for one, it’s tape. For the other, they’ve spent the last nine years in an unheated garage and had no real special storage treatment before that.

Twenty years for tape is not a bad deal considering I have 1x CDs that are no longer readable by current equipment…

Just a brief note because I had the opportunity to test a CyberPower Gamer Infinity 1950 system with an Intel QX6700 (Q=Quad Core, X=eXtreme) that they’d clocked up to 3.46GHz from its native 2.66GHz…

The quads are way faster than the dual core HT Pentiums. (See what adjusting your pipelines will do?) They’re also equivalently faster than the Core 2 Duos. Now the caveat to that is that all depends on the software you’re using.

When addressing all four cores, the thing speeds along without a hitch. If the software only uses one core, the QX6700 is about as fast as a Pentium 955 Extreme for heavy lifting task and about as fast as an FX60 for task that require minimal processing but a lot of CPU/memory throughput.The moral of this story is, don’t buy a quad core unless you can actually use one.