Tuesday, January 3, 2006

Holiday Shopping

Since it is a new year, I decided to do some computer upgrades. Starting with the memory, I upgraded one machine from 512megs to 1.5gigs of memory. I saw a rebate at Fry's so the upgrade only costs me around $60 for a 1 gig of Kingston 400MHz DDR pair. As I installed the memory, I realized just how quiet the Antec Sonata case is (good thing since that was the reason I picked it). I was tempted to upgrade the linux server to a Sonata case or possibly Shuttle case, but held myself back because it'll take about $1k for the cases, memory, HDD, etc.

The 'ol P2-300Mhz linux box is still chugging fine along after all these years. It is a little slow, but overall it is still able to handle the job. It's fairly quiet compared to many modern machines, but the sound is noticable when it is the only machine on in the room. I did decide to take out the CDRW drive out of the box and replace it with a Toshiba DVD burner that was also on sale at Fry's since I have files on the box that I wish to archive to a DVD but don't want to copy it all to my main box first.

Linux was able to recognize the drive at boot and auto-mounted when I put in a CD, so I thought I was in good shape. However, I kept seeing a wierd errors in my message log. I added hdx=ide-scsi to the boot parameter and the message went away and I was still able to read and write a CD, but when I try to burn a DVD using the .iso file I created, it wouldn't work. While I'm still trying to figure it out, Mac suggested that I download Nero for linux and try that. I think I will but then... the requirements are P3-500Mhz! (T_T)

Sigh... oh, well. Guess it's back to figuring out why cdrecord won't write to the media. >_<

A few things have been tempting my gadget senses. A Shuttle system with an AMD 64-bit FX chip would sure be nice on my desk. ^^ There's some nice looking 19"+ LCD monitors that look mighty fine, and I admit that I'm curious about Mac on Intel running OSX.

Urgh, why do I torture myself... ^^;

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