Creative Orphans

I happen to have a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro that my wife had gotten me for Christmas of 2003.  At the time, it was the best you could get.  And it was (and still is) a great piece of hardware.

But anyone who has owned anything from Creative knows how quickly they orphan their products.  And as a guy who can't throw anything working away, I couldn't do it with this sound card.  (Especially knowing how much my wife paid for it back in the day...)

Now, I'll admit it's not flawless, but the latest OEM drivers from Creative gets this card working well in Windows 7.

But I found this really great blog about Creative Sound cards.  If anyone is having problems with theirs, I direct you to No More Goat Soup.

When it rains in Thailand...

As part of my NAS project, I was intending to get it working before investing in filling it full of hard-drives (since they would be the single most expensive part of making it a reality.)

Two months ago when I was pricing out hard drives, I had found a Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB drive for about $70 bucks. I was thinking of buying two of them. But I thought with Christmas on the horizon, it would be a good thing to ask for as a gift.

I recently went to see how the prices were going into Black Friday. Much to my surprise, the same drive is currently running $250 on Newegg! More than 3 times what it was two months ago. I couldn't believe it.

At first, I thought it was an artificial price increase to give an appearance of a sale during the holiday season. However, a friend of mine pointed me to this article:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-57322023-64/hard-disk-shortage-hits-consumer-outlets/

Awesome. Now I have to wait 6-12 months. Maybe Christmas next year.

By the way, the graph was produced at camelcamelcamel.com.  It's pretty sweet.  All you have to do is paste a link from any product on Amazon.com and it will give you the price history.  Happy shopping.