My former roommate just moved back to Florida. He asked why I haven’t been blogging lately. In part it has been due to evolving interests and demands on my time, but mostly I blame my computer.
My computer has not been well since the great motherboard swap. About nine months ago it went from crashing monthly to weekly, and a few months later it started locking up just about any time I used it for more than an hour. I figured that it was probably due to cruft — I upgraded to XP from a mid-Y2K Windows 2000 install — so I picked up a 160GB drive a few months back so that I could migrate to a from-scratch XP install without jeopardizing any of my precious data.
Unfortunately, a fresh install was not the solution. With nothing installed except the motherboard’s IDE / AGP chipset drivers, my laser printer, and Firebird, it still locked up on a regular basis. I began to suspect the chipset drivers, but without them the 160GB drive would revert to PIO mode once Windows loaded. Life is painful without UDMA.
I decided to give Linux a shot as my desktop OS, using Fedora Core 1 with APT-RPM. The numerous improvements over RedHat Linux are impressive; a full Fedora install takes about 1/3rd the time of RedHat 9 on all of the machines I’ve tried it on, there’s a really neat VNC-based remote graphical installation mode, and setting up my Samsung ML-1210 laser printer was a cake walk. Unfortunately, the desktop experience still ranges from sucky to excruciating, and lockups were still happening (far less often, thankfully).
Now, I’m preparing to start my own business soon, and a laptop will be a necessity, so… after consulting my bank balance I placed an order for a Dell 8600. My timing was perfect, my $1400 taxed and shipped Pentium M 1.4GHz w/ 15.4″ 1680×1050 Widescreen, 802.11b + g, and Bluetooth came with free upgrades to a 4x DVD+RW, 512MB RAM, and a 40GB HD. I have some nits to pick with it, mostly related to the keyboard and pointing devices, but overall it is a damned fine machine at a price the competition could not come close to.
I also ordered an Athlon XP “Barton” 2500+ 1GB setup for my desktop from NewEgg, with an NForce 2 chipset that I’ve been told is very stable and integrated everything (DualHead even), but they accidentally shipped a motherboard without the onboard NIC so I’m waiting on a replacement…
Thanks for blogging again Bryce. You are an excellent writer and very insightful. Not only that, but I trust your judgement on all sorts of technology topics. I’ve consulted your blog on numerous occasions before considering a major purchase. Keep up the good work.