eor

Usually I have no excuse for my lack of posts, but the last few days I've been forced into silence. My computer went on strike and I spent the last two evenings trying to convince it to stop navel gazing and start doing something again. It's not a good thing when your virus definition file happens to land on a bad disk sector. Everything moved very slowly while the demented antivirus program wandered around wondering where it left its keys. They were in the freezer and the mail was in the oven. Last night was spent waiting for the excrutiatingly slow scandisk, then virus uninstall, then reinstall.

Before coming up with that bright idea I was busy trying all kinds of other things. I took the case apart and cleaned all the fans and arranged things so the hard drive has a lot more air around it. I finally took the time to locate and remove all the helpful Adobe and Quickbooks update programs that load on boot by default. Abode is one small step above malware, or perhaps below. I deleted a bunch of programs I don't use, just on principle.

A new drive is on order because this was a good scare and I'm not going to take a chance on a drive that's shedding sectors. Tomorrow I may be offline again while I reinstall the world. But in the meantime I'm going to try to spam your flist with entries. Time to get caught up.

"The middle of the road is trying to find me,
I'm standing in the middle of my life,
with my pants behind me."

So I was really distracted this afternoon by setting up derien's new PC. This is the first PC made of all new parts she's had in years. Like 15! So I'm totally distracted by making it right, because I'm anal retentive as hell. Wire ties, I have a thing for them.

Anyway, it's ungodly hot and humid, so at some point I think "something cold to drink would be good." Ten minutes or so later I remember the thought and append to it, I could have a rum and coke. I get as far as filling the glass with ice and get distracted by the need to look at RAM heat sinks on the Internet. After who knows how long, I remember the concept of beverage. I bop out to the kitchen, grab a coke and start pouring it over the ice. Oh, yeah, I was going to put some rum in that, something I usually do first so it get mixed in well with all the bubbly goodness. No worries, I'll add it now that the glass is halfway full, while thinking of other things. (Here it is kids, mistake number one.) Pour, pour, pour. Oh, wait, this is not coke I'm glug, glug, glugging into the glass! Oh, ****! That looks as transparent as a drink you'd get at a dive bar. (Here is mistake number two. Don't try this at home kids!) I'm not going to waste that much coke. Well, maybe if I drink it down a ways, I can add the rest of the can of coke. Oh, wow, that is strong. Maybe not. Maybe if I get another glass and pour half in that and fill the rest up with coke. Oh, wow, I'm glad I'm not going anywhere this century.

It's a good thing it doesn't take a license to drive a mouse or a brain to install Windows 7. Only 37 updates to install, woot!

The goal with this machine was originally to make a machine as power efficient as reasonably possible, do some shuffling, and retire a 7 year old machine. After a discussion with derien, we may retire two machines after all the moving around is done.

( the ugly details )
The components fit together quite well considering the calculated risks I took. I had to take some plastic off the large fan on the side of the case so that it would clear the CPU cooling tower, but the dremel tool handled that easily. I also had to hack together a longer USB cable to run from my multi-card reader to the USB headers, but that was minor.

Other than the onboard video for X giving a lower than ideal resolution, everything works with FreeBSD-stable.

With all the other PCs off, no music playing, and the fridge compressor off, you can just hear the machine at idle. I haven't run any stress tests on it, but for what I use it for most of the time it will be virtually silent.

We'll start with the ugly and work our way up: ( I spent 7 hours trying to rebuild someone else's PC last night. (long and boring cut) )

For the bad: I'm now reformatting the bloody thing and putting win 2K on it. *cringe* Bless me father, for I -have- sinned.

And the good: The fact that I could sit and work on something for seven hours at a stretch without hardly moving shows I'm back to my old self. Yesterday I also did things like housework, loaded more ebooks on the readers, and caught up on emails. In short, I did more yesterday than in the whole month of November.

But where did my long weekend go?