(This post is primarily for Trev as a rundown of my boxen)
A couple of years ago now I got rid of most of my computers. Outside of my main workstation I had five other systems of varying ages kicking around the house. Some of them were too old to do that much with and as much as I love having multiple computers there comes a level where it is pretty fucking pointless to have that many machines, especially low end ones. So I stripped out the hdds and destroyed the platters and all of them were shipped off to that great computer graveyard down the road. Even my beloved Hal.
Hal wasn’t my first computer. I had a tsr-80 back in the day, I also had an 8088 and a 386. But those were never machines that I bonded with, and I never named them. Hal was the computer I got in university and the one on which I actually started learning about how computers actually work. Hal was also the first one I named. You can tell I have an attachment to one of my boxes when I name it. The earlier machines were not much more than game playing, typewriters upon which I would issue “magical commands” and said applications would start. I still remember watching a friend on his computer many moons ago working in dos and windows 3.1. I was certain I would never understand how those magical things work.
Nowadays I am down to just two computers, but it’s enough. The workstation these days is named Odin, because for once I built something similar to what the ars technica guys call a god box. Odin is an intel Q6600 quadcore running at 2.4 ghz, factory clock settings. I don’t overclock my shit, I can’t be bothered. He is built around an asus mobo and I have had no complaints about the brand so far. The mobo is loaded to capacity with 8 gigs of ram and I am using the onboard lan. I don’t really see much point in dropping in a separate network card simply because the onboard stuff these days is of such high quality. I am running two hdds, one for each OS on the box, one dvd burner, and my video is powered by an nvidia 8800gt 512mb version. The whole box runs off of a 700 watt power supply rated for SLI made by OCZ, which basically means I have a shitload of amps on the 12 volt rail.
Operating systems for Odin is a whole other kettle of fish. I started out dual booting between XP and Linux. Xp worked fine but at the time my system was built there was a big issue with Linux revving the fans on the newer nvidia cards to the point that it was extremely loud and rapidly ramped up the chance of burning out the part prematurely. I eventually moved from 32 bit XP to Vista 64 bit, and that is also when I slapped the mobo completely full of ram. The nvidia issue had been solved under linux so I popped a newer version of Ubuntu on there and then the fun began.
I am not sure what kind of crack the developers were smoking in the later revisions but I had trouble out the yingyang. First off my onboard lan wouldn’t work. Despite it being a common component the support wasn’t in the newest version of the distro. The annoying thing was there was driver support in the previous version. So I downgraded, but the desktop performance was so shitty I could have sworn I was having a Windows 95 flashback.
I gave up on Ubuntu and for shits and giggles I dropped a copy of opensuse on there and it works like a charm. I have been running that ever since. The install is using the default kde desktop, which didn’t used to be an issue with me, but somewhere along the course of its development kde got really convoluted. Nothing makes sense with the nitty gritty of the desktop, so heaven help you if you want to customize it, you have to google some of the simplest tasks because the manner in which you go about them probably would only seem to be common sense to a retarded hillbilly with an acute case of aspergers syndrome. But it is still is usable as long as you don’t want to move shit around.
As for computer number two, that is the laptop and his name is Hermes, upon whom this very post is being written. Hermes is a Compaq dual core intel lappy running at 1.73 ghz, with a gig of ram. He is mobile surfing box/ type writer. I didn’t buy a pimped out lappy like Dan simply because I don’t have a huge need for mobile computing at this point and frankly Hermes has enough digital juice for me to get things done on him.
I have been very lazy in regards to this system. I have left the factory install of Vista Home Premium 32 bit on here, which means I have all the extra shit they dump on with factory installs. At some point I might dump XP on here instead, but I honestly can’t be bothered right now.
But those are my boys, they both serve their purpose well. At some point I want to grab a third system again to start fucking around again with either gentoo or linux from scratch again. But for my main workstation and lappy I want a finished OS, I don’t it to be a work in progress when I simply need to get shit done. Currently though I will stick with what I have.
