Loss of service
Well, a week after my initial post that I had some minor hardware failures and my subsequently unimpressed mood seem to have failed in that weeks offering of random goatlings and virgins to $DEITY.
Result: major hardware failure across the board.
1) Whitestar .. our main and server-ish box died spectacularly. Considering this box does DHCP, NFS, local Slackware-12.0/-current mirror and much other goodness. *poof*
2) My freecycle Ubuntu box just proofed how much suckiness it really was and refused to boot up at all.
3) Kethry’s box at that time decided to fail her main harddrive.
Needless to say, there was much unhappiness not to mention I think I enriched the neighbourhood in the more colourful aspects of both the English and Dutch language.
Anyway after sitting down with kethry we had a bit of a talk about the possibilities of purchasing new hardware, which thankfully was possible due to her receiving some extra birthday money (note: must return money. need to rob some kids of their cider money ;) )
Anyway thanks to andarius who was rather (read: extremely) helpful and patient dealing with my absolute noobness on hardware building. However: after a day of debating and looking at the various options I decided to go for a “budget-build” of a new computer, but one that actually will keep me going for the next while. I think I have not done all that badly for about £ 250,- (roughly USD$ 505,- / CAD$ 531 / € 370,- / 4,724,582.69 IDR (well if I missed any other country see xe.com))
The specs are pretty much as following:
- Gigabyte GA M61PM-S2 nForce 430 AMD Socket AM2
- AMD CPU AM2 Athlon 64 Dual Core 4000
- OCZ 1GB Kit (2×512) Platinum Series DDR2 PC6400 800MHz Dual Channel Memory And Platinum Heatspreader [1]
- Liteon 20x DVDRW/RAM Beige
- 200GB Seagate Barracuda SATA2 8MB
- 2x Ultra Quiet 120mm Case Fan (x2)
- Xilence 480W Gaming PSU
- Arianet 402TK Midi Case Silver Black
Result: A nice and exceedingly fast box, that rather outpaces my previous box. For now that box is running Slackware 12.0 .. in due time I’m looking forward to give Slamd64 a run :) Even though it was pretty stressful at times, I am somewhat happy that I have done it. [2] It was all in all a pretty uhm “interesting” learning experience.
So after being a week offline[3], I need to rebuild this box and keths as well. We’ve also switched away from the Babylon5 naming scheme and gone for a more classical Greek naming scheme. Her box is now named Persephone (or perhaps rather .. her)and mine Hades.
[1] – This had to be replaced as one of the memory sticks turned to be bad. Luckily after explaining the tests I had done (ie swapping memory sticks around and kernel compiles etc), they quickly swapped it around.
[2] – Andarius – a big thank you for your patience and insights :D
[3] – Most annoyingly, the loads of emails and rss/blogs I have to catch up with.
what you haven’t said is that i wanted to call mine “Monica” after Monica Bellucci (she who plays Persephone, of course), but you wouldn’t let me. something about being too Monicaish already. *sulk*.
seriously though: i back up the thanks to andarius.. and thankyou to you too, love, for working so hard to get all this fixed.
xx
It was my pleasure to be of some use. Congrats on the new system.
Kethry, Monica would leave it open to to many variables (insert Monica Lewinsky). An affiliation I am sure you don’t want. Besides : Persephone was the Queen of the Underworld, consort of Hades :)
ok thats true. about Persephone. i think i prefer that anyway. :)
They sound very sensible names. So I guess you didn’t want to use my my naming convention? Calling PC’s after items of common furniture ~ Names even I won’t forget.
Nice to see you back and online, by the way.
Why would I forget them? Besides remembering you only called your “wardrobe” because that is more or less its resting place. And you haven’t called your dell workstation “desk” afaik.
The naming convention or perhaps the actual names make sense on more than one level ;)
Hey, congrats on your new box. I think you will get happier now, since not only you get the replacement, but it is faster than before.
From the price in Indonesian, that was considered cheap, but the specs was awesome. We don’t get that spec with that price in here :D