Updates!

Time for an update...

I got a new phone; the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. It's quite nice and snazzy, but has lots of annoyances - although that might just be because it's my first phone.
Things that annoy me so far:

There's no manual. It comes with a sheet of folded A3 paper telling you how to switch the phone on and insert the battery, and there's a user guide in the phone itself (A load of HTML files), but this is severely lacking. The Sony Ericsson site is pretty crap for information too.

It took me about 3 hours to change the text message alert. There's plenty of information about how to change the alert to one of the built-in sounds, but no mention of setting a custom MP3 to play. Even searching on the Internet yielded no results save for one guy saying it's impossible. I only found out how to do it by looking through every file on the SD card and finding one audio file called "Facebook_pop", which I recognised as one of the message alerts you can change to. I added an MP3 in the same folder and then the phone detected it and gave me the option to use it as a message alert.

The touchscreen is a bit funny sometimes; it seems like the software has some problems distinguishing between a tap and a swipe - but then I imagine this is a general touchscreen problem rather than specific to my phone.

The music player doesn't remember the track position when you pause the track then exit the player - my previous phone (A Sony Ericsson K850i) managed that just fine. I listen to audiobooks on my commute to/from work, and it's annoying to have to make a note of where in the track I am when I switch it off and then seek there when I next start up.

The music player's seek is awkward to use - it's touch screen too, which makes it very difficult to make little changes. Seek back 10 seconds in a 30 minute MP3? Good luck, the least I managed was about 3 minutes.

No "real" keyboard, just touchscreen. Not such a big deal really, and I'm sure I'll get used to it.

The software that comes with the phone (On the SD card) doesn't install on XP x64. Also not too bad, since hardly anything does really...

Due to the lack of information anywhere about playing audiobook (M4B) files, or more specifically where to put them on the SD card, I ended up having to E-mail Sony support. That was 3 days ago, still no reply...

Overall, I'm sure I'll get used to it, and it's nice to have a smartphone for a change. I hope to look into doing some Android dev at some point in the reasonably near future.

In other news, I bought a new 2TB hard drive since my old 1TB drive was almost full, and I got a 80GB solid state drive too. Since the SSD is 2.5" and my PC case only handles 3.5" drives, I had to get a mounting bracket thing too.
My PC case (An Arctic Cooling Silentium T1) is one of these "Easy install" cases, so you clip a couple of runners onto the drive (into the screw holes) and then the runners slide into the case.
All well and good except the hard drive runners don't fit the mounting bracket; which has the screw holes in a different place. I ended up taking a hacksaw and super glue to two runners to attach them to the bracket, and then putting that in the PC case. Then I realised two things:
1. Those were my last two hard drive runners, and I have 2 more hard drives to put in the PC.
2. The floppy disk drive runners would have fitted the mounting bracket

After getting everything plugged in, I managed to break the power switch on the case by pulling one of the wires out. Then I discovered that neither of the two soldering irons we have in the house worked, so I had to go and buy a new one - which causes the fuses to blow when the iron gets to maximum temperature. Sigh.

So, I've got it all working now (just), but I've ordered a new PC case too, since I'm fed up with mine and I don't care how silent it is or isn't.

I've now got Windows 7 x64 installed, and I've downloaded VC2010 and Office 2010 from my MSDN subscription, so I'll see how they go.

I'd like to say that my SSD is lightning fast and everything is awesome, but I can't really tell. I can get into Windows from the BIOS in about 5-10 seconds, but I don't know if that's because of the SSD, Windows 7, or because it's a clean install...