Well…. Since I got my new machines as seen in these posts, I re-org’d my home network setup slightly.

I have 2 ~300 gb external firewire drives. I use these as my ‘primary’ and ‘backup’ drives. Everything permanent goes on the primary and the backup is cloned daily. These drives are setup under Meme - a Suse machine. They are shared out to the LAN using NFS for other linux machines and Samba for other Windows clients.

• 2 ~300 gb external firewire drives. ‘primary’ and ‘backup’ drives. primary cloned daily.
• Meme -  primary Suse linux server. AMD based 1 GB RAM
• Nemo - windows server - Windows XP Pro. AMD based 1 GB RAM
• HP - New machine -  primary windows desktop - AMD dual core 64 bit athlon. 2 GB RAM
• Plex - New notebook - dual boot - Suse 10.1/ Windows XP Pro (Usually Suse) - dual core - Intel Core Duo 2 GB RAM

I went through setting up both Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Frankly - I just like the Suse distro. I have had a suse machine for some time now. The Meme machine was running Redhat for ~2 years — again, I am just so accustomed to the Suse distro, that I put it on all the machines.

I have donated yet another notebook to a loved one. My Compaq notebook was great, but - it became unreliable. But for someone who wants to just check email etc - and has nothing - it is useful. So my brother in law is now the proud owner of it. The Sony (that I hated) before that Compaq has been serving my sister Jen and her husband (a mac lover) for some years now.

Vista machine coming soon…
-Chris

As I mentioned the other day - I just ordered a new notebook - fun. I also mentioned I would be ordering a new desktop soon - and that day has come.

While the new notebook is still en route to me (hopefully wed or thurs I will have it), the new desktop is already home. I had this odd melange of amex gift cards and excess Thank You Points from Citibank so I rolled them up with a (very) few actual $ and got me an HP ‘Media Center PC’. Needless to say - this machine will be the home for either Suse 10 or Ubuntu - bye bye ‘media center’… So here are the details:

Points to note…

7200 RPM SATA drives will do - I wish they were even faster drives.

Corny - but the  LightScribe thing looks pretty cool. In short - you can ‘laser etch’ labels onto a CD or DVD in the  drive.

I am psyched mostly about the dual core AMD 4200s 64s that are in there - nice - this is my 1st dual core and my 1st 64 bit system…
2 Gig of fast RAM

Great stuff - my home computing world is nicely updated now. My basic home setup is now 3 AMD based ‘desktop’ systems - 2 Windows (1 as server, 1 as desktop) 1 Linux. I also have 2 External firewire backup drives (~250-300gb each). My old notebook is *dead* so - my new notebook will be the only one - Windows XP also. Interestingly - my personal storage total is now somewhere in the 1.5 TB area - what with external backup drives and what is in all of these machines. That is enough for me for some time to come.

-Chris

Well - it was time for a new notebook. After Micah - my now 17 month old stood up on my Compaq notebook - it was all downhill from there. The USB ports on the back had been failing, the CD drive was dead, it would decide not to power up at all sometimes etc. So - I spent much effort these past few evenings trying to sort out a new laptop.

In my current situation - my desktop computers are in my bedroom. That said - most of my home computing time comes between the hours of 10 PM and 1 AM weekdays and during my kids nap time during the weekends. So - I cannot be in my bedroom… This means that I am ALWAYS on a notebook somewhere besides my bedroom - where my lovely wife Shannon and my 17 month old Micah still sleeps (When he is 2 my boys get bunk beds and share a room - we live in Brooklyn - space is a commodity.). So - Having an excellent notebook that I will be using 99% of the time from IN my house is key.

A few points that I considered. Notebooks tend to have sucky slow hard drives. I needed to either get a fast aftermarket drive - or better yet -a fast drive out of the box. I also want a large screen. I am used to developing with dual monitors. Working on a small screen is hard for me. I also need lots of the other #s.. mhz, mb, gb, rpm, etc. - just to support working, multitasking, developing, etc. I debated for a while between a 64 bit CPU and a dual core CPU. I really wanted a dual core 64 bit AMD cpu - but they are not out for notebooks yet (not from a real vendor at least). *The new desktop I am ordering in the next few weeks will be a dual core Amd 64 bit . In any case - my only real option was the Intel Core Duo. A video card - it is important to have a decent video card. I think people underrate the importance of a dedicated video card. Even more - people underestimate fast disk importance - so at least a 7200 RPM disk set was important to me as well.

So - my debate came down to the Dell Inspiron E1705 9400 2.0GHz and the HP dv8000t  also @ 2GHz. At the end of the day - I opted for the dell. As much as there are stories for ‘dead dells’ out there - there seem to be more (and more credible) stores regarding ‘bad HP notebooks’. My favorite set of debates was on a forum where people that were ‘tech support’ people at a University and at a Best Buy Geek Squad - talked about their experiences. In any case - here is what is coming new to my doorstep soon:

• Intel 2.0Ghz Core Duo T2500 Processor
• 17 inch Ultrasharp Wide Screen WUXGA Display with Truelife (1,920 by 1,200 pixels)
• 2 GIGS DDR2 (fast) 667Mhz SDRAM
• 100GB 7,200RPM SATA Hard Drive
• DVD+/-RW burner
• Internal Wireless 802.11 B/G
• 256MB nVidia GeForce Go 7800
• XP Pro SP2

Needless to say - I am like a kid waiting for Christmas now.

-Chris