Techy: New Computer.. Mmm…

Yes! I should be able to get back to normal blogging and stuff shortly – I’ve now finished setting up my brand new computer! Yep, I splashed out £880.80 on a brand spanking new machine last week and it was delivered at 8.10am on Wednesday (whilst I was in my dressing gown). I spent Wednesday night setting it up, Thursday cleaning the house, Friday sleeping and Saturday making a voyage of discovery…

Before I jump the shark (wheee!), I may also well be an “ultimate geek” and list the spec. of the new machine. It’s a Dell Dimension 4550 mini-tower machine with a 2.5Ghz Intel Pentium 4 (dah-dah-dah-ding!) processor and 256Mb RAM: complete with a 10/100 NIC, NEC DVD+RW drive (yep, it’s a DVD writer!), 64Mb NVIDIA GeForce Graphics card, 60Gb IDE hard drive, 17″ monitor, 6 USB ports, in built 56K modem and a nifty ball-less scrollwheel mouse.

Software wise, it came with Windows XP Home Edition and some other stuff (such as MS Works). For the time being at least, I’m keeping Win XP on this machine until I decide what I’m doing with my old machine: but I’ve installed Office 2000, ZoneAlarm, Symantec Anti-virus, Digiguide, EditPlus, Mailwasher Pro, Adobe Photoshop and all the other software I had on my old machine.

Aren’t I worried about breaching the “one machine/one license” rule? Nope. Because as soon as I had installed the essentials and upgraded Windows XP (it had nearly 40 critical updates to install), I “downed” my old machine (just as it was beginning to make funny noises)…

On Saturday, I decided to move my nice Alcatel PC DSL card over to the new machine from my year and a month (so just outside the warranty period…) old machine which, at this point, was taking around 8 re-boots and an hour of time to start up every time.

I opened the machine up and practically choked to death on the dust! Yep: I suspect that’s why it was malfunctioning (and hence I could have probably saved buying a new computer!). Indeed, the fan for the 1Ghz Athlon processor looked like it had melted (but, in fact, was just a large caking of dust). I’ve now moved the DSL card to the Dell (which I’ve named “Ford” with my old machine being known as “Zaphod” – guess which author I’m a fan of? 🙂 ) and the Dell is now running my home network (which currently consists of, erm, itself!).

My old machine is currently in around a dozen parts in my spare room (bar the processor fan that is sitting under my desk) waiting for me to vacuum clean it out carefully. One thing that has shocked me is how quiet the Dell is: I could hear Zaphod grinding away all night (yep, my machines tend to be on 24/7), but with the Dell I have to toggle the keyboard light indicators to see if the machine is on!

With regards my old machine, once I’ve cleaned it out I may wipe its dual hard drives and install Linux on it – but which flavor of Linux, I haven’t decided yet. I’m “in charge” of 3 servers which run RedHat Linux, but I “own” a Debian Linux machine and I’ve found the latter slightly easier to use – so there’s something to be said for both variants. Or, I could just re-install Windows 2000 on it and get it dual booting with Linux…. Decisions, decisions. Plus I want to move my computer units into my spare bedroom (at the moment they are both on a very cramped desk in the corner of my main bedroom – ideal for watching movies at night, but it does keep me in my bedroom). But, before I move them (and I’ve really got to – running an alarm clock, printer, 2 PCs, 2 monitors, 2 speakers and stuff off a single power socket with 3 daisy chained extension cables is probably not a good idea), I’ve got to re-wire my ADSL telephone line from my bedroom window to the spare bedroom – lots of fun 🙁

Anyway, that’s explained what I’ve been busy doing recently (and, luckily enough, no one has yet correctly guessed round 31 of Guess That Movie) and hopefully I’ll be able to get some real work done now at home. I just need to get the physical energy to do so….