Hardware Blues
From the “Win98se to Linux and back again” Dept.
I’ve been playing around with the ol’ Pentium 200mmx. I’m trying to get it ready to go live again for Family use (probably as Kai’s personal computer).
I thought that this would be a perfect time to install Linux on the computer. It’s a a fully featured OS that is actively developed and supported. Moreover, it’s suppose to breath new life into older hardware.
I downloaded the Morphix OS — a neat little OS distribution that can be ran off a CD. The light version weighs in at a svelte 175 MBytes. It is really impressive. It features a recent kernel, a small suite of applications for accessing the Internet, a wordprocessor—all on one CD. Quite good.
It’s performance on the P200mmx was a lacking though — even with Xfce 4.0rc2; a very light window manager.
So I reinstalled Win98SE again. Now it runs fine.
From the “Cold War begins; again” Dept.
Kevin bought a 120 GB harddrive for his computer.
Damn him.
From the “Cold War continues” Dept.
Coincidentally, I’ve been recently obsessing over symmetic multi-processing systems. Computers with 2 or more CPUs.
I’ve always wanted one—On eBay you can buy a motherboard and 2 Pentium3 993 MHz CPUs for $340 CDN.
Granted the system would be a dead-end in terms of expandability, upgradeability, etc. However, it would be a cool system to get my feet wet. The only turn off was the motherboard being advertised was a known lemon with a rather high mortality rate.
From the “I can always dream” Dept.
So after much thinking, wringing hands, etc. I finally decided not to buy the dual P3 mobo and CPUs. Many a chat with Fred and Kevin convinced me that my gut reaction over the motherboard and general “staleness” of the architecture was correct. They also gave several good reasons, but perhaps the most important was, “What are you going to use it for?“
Good question. I have no idea.
Multi-CPU systems are only good for a limited number of applications – Web Server applications, Databases, 3D rendering and compositing, Photoshop, Video encoding and editing, and sound manipulation. Since I really don’t do any of these things, it’s hard to warrant the purchase of a dual CPU rig.
Oh well.
From the “In my spare time” Dept.
Last week I did manage to poke around in the 2cpu.com forums, and I’ve developed a pretty nice starter system.
- 2 x AMD 1.3 GHz Duron Processors
- Tyan Tiger MPX Dual processor capable Motherboard
- 1 x Corsair 512 MB DDR2100 ECC Registered Ram
- 2 VANTEC Aeroflow SocketA CPU COOLERs (5600 RPM)
- ANTEC 1080AMG Case with 430 Watt TruePower PSU
Ideally, I would use Dave’s old TNT2 AGP card for the time being, as well as stripping my SCSI components from the family computer for it’s HDD, CD, etc.
Total cost: $ 1049.67 (including Taxes + Shipping)
I’m not sure what I’d want to do with this system like this (it’s definitely no speed demon considering people have Athlon XPs running in SMP mode at 2800+ speeds).
Cheers,
Tai