i’m back!!!!!!!!
After my long pilgrimage that brought me to the heights of the Himalayan mountains, the depths of the Marianas trench and the newly-opened KFC branch at Greenbelt just besides Chili’s, I am proud to say that I am back!!! Gone for more than two weeks, let me fill you in with what’s been keeping me very busy so far.
My Desktop Rocks!
I’ve got a new baby now. Her name’s Trailblazer. It’s a replacement desktop for Grunt - the rig that I borrowed from my brother. Grunt’s been acting up on me lately, randomly resetting on its own and not allowing me to use more than one USB device at a time. Really can’t blame Grunt for its failing hardware, it’s a six year old AMD Athlon 1Ghz desktop that’s served as a computer gaming desktop in its wee years, a school productivity workstation during its mid-life and a downloader/file server/home theater pc (htpc) in it’s recent years.
Hardware is like a flower… it Dies
Grunt still works, but as a system developer and trained with certain computer security princeiples in mind, I can’t tolerate random resets.
While Zoom (my core duo laptop) will happily bear the burden of my system developing escapades, nothing replaces a desktop in terms of graceful accident escalation. If my current desktop dies late at night, I can take out the hard disk, plop it in another desktop, and resume working. Takes no more than 10 minutes to recover. Now I can’t say the same with a laptop since I’m not too comfortable with the inner workings of laptops. Different tools for different situations.
Eh? Hard drive failure you say? I do a FULL backup of my work files every night before I go to sleep (or every morning before I go to sleep, heh) ~ I always have a tube of blank CDs just for that purpose. And I backup my current project on two different hard disks over my house network every hour so the most that can be lost is an hour worth of work.
Going back to Trailblazer, such peace of mind costs only PhP33,500. For a low, low, low price of $600, you’ll get a computer that slices, dices, mixes, peels potato skin with ease and squeezes orange juice like no other can!
- AMD Athlon64 3200+ @ 2.0 Ghz
- MSI RS480M2-IL
- Inno3d GeForce 7600GT
- 1×1GB Kingston PC3200
- Sony Dual-Layer DVD Writer
- Enforcer Casing
- Two Auxiliary Fans
Yes, you read that right. I didn’t get the following :
- hard drive - I transferred my 160GB Seagate Hard Drive from Grunt and used it as my hard drive
- floppy drive - I can’t recall the last time I used a floppy. With the ability to boot from high storage capacity and reliable USB thumb drives, I’m passing out on the 3point5s
- sound card - My motherboard already has a built-in 5.1 audio solution. I tried it out but it’s crappy ~ you’ll hear clicks whenever you play something that’s above a certain sound wave frequency. Did that make sense? So I got my old Creative Sound Card (P300 ~ $6) to banish all the clicks and hisses to oblivion.
- monitor - Current one still works. And while I might want a bigger or newer one, I really don’t need one.
I’m currently stress-testing Trailblazer right now. I’m looking at how the hardware manages through 24/7 up times , how well it can run my development software and perform my entertainment-related needs.
More on such intricacies and actual performance next time. For now, gotta go!
