Category: hardware

Received my Opteron 165 and Scythe Ninja heatsink last night. It didn’t take long before my system was torn apart and the new parts were installed. Installation was straigtforward, but damn, that heatsink should not be advertising that it has easy to use clips.

So is there an improvement moving from a single-core 2.0 GHz chip to a dual core 1.8? I definitely saw it. The entire system feels smoother, and I can continue to use my system while performing heavy tasks. I’m sure I’d see even more improvements if I were compiling stuff in Gentoo, but for now, the ability to continue working as normal while playing with 4 GB ISO images, running Qemu, and burning stuff, makes it a great upgrade.

Next up in the performance upgrade pipeline is some DDR500 memory. With some simple overclocking this CPU can run like an FX60!

Received my shiny new 1 GB stick of memory for my Mac Mini today. Installing it probably took the longest of any memory install I’ve ever done, but only because I wasn’t able to get the damn case open. The problem was tools, I didn’t have the required sharpened putty knife, but in the end, a regular knife allowed me to get a regular metal spatula in the case and pop it open. In the range of computers which suck to work on, old HP cases still win, because they take longer to open, and the design has no redeeming qualities.

The original 512 stick from the Mini moves to my old Shuttle SN45G, and my 1 GB memory purchase just got me another operational computer.

Picked up a 300 GB SATA Seagate w/16MB Cache hard drive at Frys today for a really nice price (even better after the MIR). It took 75 minutes to copy the 160 GB on my current drive to the new one, and my comp is smoother now. Gotta figure out what to do with my 250 GB SATA now, I’ll probably hold on to it and rebuild my raid array with it, to replace the current 7x120GB.

After that was at Circuit City waiting for Christina to return some stuff and saw that the laptops were picking up some rogue wifi signal (linksys + att dsl) so I downloaded and installed firefox on a couple of them. Then I opened up reviews of the current model in FF and left it open. One got 5/10 at cnet, which is quite a feat.

This is my first post from my nokia 770 internet tablet. This thing has not stopped impressing me since I got it. I have previously owned a palm m100 and a dell axiom w/wifi, but neither come anywhere close to what this thing can do.

So far I have installed openssh, xterm, vncviewer, vim, doom, xchat, gaim, and bash. I briefly tried the built in email app, but ditched it in favor of webmail, which looks so much nicer. All my pim stuff is already done on the web, so the 770 just makes it easier for me to access it. My only issue is that I don’t know how to add stuff to del.icio.us from it.