Make and Brake PCs
It has been pretty tough these day for the machines I work with. Two machines at work died shortly after my arrival. The central server, built by me, had a failing hard drive. This server operated at remote.jrrzz.net and was a nice 2.4Ghz P4 on a DFI uATX all-in board running Debian GNU/Linux. The ext3 filesystem got remounted as read only. The disk was a P-ATA Maxtor diamondmax 8 120GB. The same disk a friend of mine ran in his pcrelaxt.nl.eu.org Celeron Mendocino machine. His disk crashed a few months ago. It seems these Maxtor drives can’t handle 24/7 uptime with low loads. Another guy I know still has got problems with his Maxtor daimondmax S-ATA disk. I don’t know what’s up with Maxtor, but this isn’t really the stuff I like to see when I arrive at work. Most of my machines still run Maxtor drives. My primary file backup system is running a P-ATA diamondmax 10 200GB. I know I can’t expect the same quality from these disks as from my Barracuda SCSI array. But they have to be able to run for a year or so? I have deceided not to buy any Maxtor disks anymore. The second machine at work that died was a Duron 1300 running Windoze XP. After a reboot it failed to load the OS. I think Windoze has screwed itself again, as usual. I’ve been able to fix that one just yet. Actually it magically fixed itself. Microsoft Logic(tm).
I’ve just ordered a new machine to serve as my primary desktop system. My old system, an XP 2500+, couldn’t handle HD video and some other heavy stuff like Yafray high def rendering. I’ve always wanted SMP and AMD64. Now I can do this without expensive Opterons and Tyan boards. Thanks to the X2 we can all enjoy a beefy 64 bit SMP kernel. The exact specs of my new system follow:
- AMD Athon64 X2 4400+
- Corsair TWINX 2048M (dual)
- Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB S-ATA II
- Asus A8N-E nForce4 Ultra
- Point of View GeForce 7800GTX 256MB
- OCZ ModStream 520W
- Debian GNU/Linux AMD64 and Windoze XP SP2 (win32) dual boot
I’m going to replace my old 19″ CRT with a nice LCD panel soon. This machine is going to boost my distributed.net score, too.
Update:
I’m writing this on my new box, as you can see when you take a look at my user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060314 Debian/1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.1-4 Firefox/1.5.0.1.
But I’m running with only 1GB of RAM right now. My Corsair DIMMs were DOA (dead on arrival). I hope I can get a new pair soon. To give you an idea how this sytem performs: Kernel build took 9m 34s. 15000fps in glxgears with Xcomposite running. Booting takes less than a minute. I still have to figure out why my custom kernel can’t see my PCI-e cards though. It can, but X.org can’t.
Lal, tats b’casue X0rg or sumt is a Fag
X.org got it working. It was nVidia’s problem actually.
Oh, and if people think the title should be ‘break’ in stread of ‘brake’ those people should think again.