It is definitely a nerdy thing to make a blog post about your new computer. That being said, let me tell you about mine.
For the last few years I have been using an old, out-dated, poorly maintained machine for my day to day work. It was JJ’s computer for a while, then he got sick of it and passed it down to me. It had seen a few upgrades here and there, but was lacking in some major areas.
A few months ago I began hording and buying parts to build myself a new workstation. I ended up with:
- A nice Antec case from one of our old servers.
- An Asus P5N-E SLI Motherboard
- An Intel Core2Duo E8400 “Wolfdale” Processor
- 4 gigs of Ram
- Some Hard drives
- Windows Vista Ultimate
I got it all assembled and installed Windows, much to my dismay, I was greeted with the familiar Blue Screen of Death.
I spent a while trying to reinstall windows, specifying drivers, and was unable to resolve this issue. Don’t think for a minute that this is my first time installing Windows either, I end up installing it about 30 times a year since I make our production images.
After an afternoon of battling Vista, I decided to see what my other options were. I could go back to the venerable Windows XP, but since I had 4GB of ram, there were some issues there. I could go with Windows XP 64bit, which would resolve my memory issues, but there were device driver issues there. After lamenting my problems to the other developers, the unanimous response was “Why don’t you just use Linux?”.
Since I already did most of my development work in a virtual machine using VMware Workstation, this was not actually that far fetched.
I downloaded the 64 bit version of Ubuntu and installed that. As was expected, it was a battle to get a few drivers installed, and it was not a painless process. However, as of now, I am really happy with the result.
It has been an interesting couple of weeks, but as of now, I am sticking with Linux.
Computer Bliss
It is definitely a nerdy thing to make a blog post about your new computer. That being said, let me tell you about mine.
For the last few years I have been using an old, out-dated, poorly maintained machine for my day to day work. It was JJ’s computer for a while, then he got sick of it and passed it down to me. It had seen a few upgrades here and there, but was lacking in some major areas.
A few months ago I began hording and buying parts to build myself a new workstation. I ended up with:
I got it all assembled and installed Windows, much to my dismay, I was greeted with the familiar Blue Screen of Death.
After an afternoon of battling Vista, I decided to see what my other options were. I could go back to the venerable Windows XP, but since I had 4GB of ram, there were some issues there. I could go with Windows XP 64bit, which would resolve my memory issues, but there were device driver issues there. After lamenting my problems to the other developers, the unanimous response was “Why don’t you just use Linux?”.
Since I already did most of my development work in a virtual machine using VMware Workstation, this was not actually that far fetched.
I downloaded the 64 bit version of Ubuntu and installed that. As was expected, it was a battle to get a few drivers installed, and it was not a painless process. However, as of now, I am really happy with the result.
It has been an interesting couple of weeks, but as of now, I am sticking with Linux.