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watertown lives again
Feb. 16th, 2004 12:29 pmI finally got around to doing the first bit of work necessary to make my desktop machine, watertown, be functional again. I went ahead and opened up the machine, took out the power supply, broke the "never open this seal" seal, and took out the old (violates FAA noise regulations for aircraft in residential areas) fan. It turned out I had a fan of the right size lying around; after a quick Home Depot run and some application of wire cutters, wire nuts, and electrical tape, I have a functional, more normally noisy machine again.
Now I just need to remember what else it was that was wrong with this. The ergonomics aren't great but better than my laptop. The two screens are nice, but I should find a window manager that deals (again) or switch to XINERAMA (with one 1600x1200 and one 1280x1024 display, though?). There's the generic "it's slow"ness, which I think is mostly the CPU (a 700 MHz Athlon), and the generic "not enough disk"ness (a 20 GB hard drive partitioned a bit much, but with 8 GB for Windows 98, 10 GB for various chunks of Linux, and 2 GB wasted, where some of that last bit is because of a bad spot on the disk). More memory would be nice, but 256 MB is adequate. So for a couple hundred bucks I could turn this back into a modern machine. But for a couple hundred bucks I could also get a new machine. I'll figure this out the next time I want to spend money.
Now I just need to remember what else it was that was wrong with this. The ergonomics aren't great but better than my laptop. The two screens are nice, but I should find a window manager that deals (again) or switch to XINERAMA (with one 1600x1200 and one 1280x1024 display, though?). There's the generic "it's slow"ness, which I think is mostly the CPU (a 700 MHz Athlon), and the generic "not enough disk"ness (a 20 GB hard drive partitioned a bit much, but with 8 GB for Windows 98, 10 GB for various chunks of Linux, and 2 GB wasted, where some of that last bit is because of a bad spot on the disk). More memory would be nice, but 256 MB is adequate. So for a couple hundred bucks I could turn this back into a modern machine. But for a couple hundred bucks I could also get a new machine. I'll figure this out the next time I want to spend money.
