How much changes in a year?

It's difficult to believe that it's been over a year since I last posted here, but much has changed. The precious Sun Ultra 2 is gone, as is the old notebook, and I don't even own a regular desktop computer.

Once the Sun Ultra 2 was pumped with RAM I decided I didn't want to work with it anymore. After seeing it pitted against a Pentium III 600MHz with 1/2 the RAM (both running Linux) I wasn't impressed. So I had a local friend I gave the machine to.

The Compaq Armada E500 went up in a puff of smoke, literally. One afternoon I decided I would compile Gentoo from scratch. About 10 hours of compiling in (100% CPU usage), even with a notebook cooler working underneath, the unit actually caught fire! Smoke started coming out the side, then a bit of fire. Can't say I was very impressed, but things change.

So what's new?

My notebook is now a Celeron 1.5GHz (Lenovo 3000 C100). It's packed with a whopping 2GB of RAM which makes burning entire FULL DVDs a matter of less than 10 minutes. I said I didn't have a desktop computer, but that's not quite accurate - my desktop computer sits on top of an entertainment unit and serves as our Personal Video Recorder (PVR). The desktop system is an Athlon XP-based motherboard running at 2GHz, with 1GB of RAM divided into 2 dual channel 512MB Kingston memory sticks. The media centre runs Linux of course. There's a Fedora-core based distribution called MythDora that merges MythTV components with Fedora Core 6. My only real complaint so far is that the Weather applet doesn't seem to work. I was pleased as punch the other evening when I got a really nice remote from another coworker to work with the media centre, no more wireless keyboard.

Last year while I was giving away stuff I had someone offer me a SGI O2. I took the offer and used it for a bit, but haven't much lately. It's one of 2 machines that I have to do something with. One machine is set up to be a LAMP development machine. I think I'll probably make it my main desktop machine, but I need to buy another LCD monitor before I work it. Something simple like a 17" LCD should do fine. My notebook is really my main machine. For a Celeron I find it has excellent performance. My main complaint with it has to do with screen scratches I couldn't see when I first got it. The screen is so close to the keyboard that it scratches is any pressure is put on it. Mine must have sat at the bottom of a pile because it had a number of key scratches I couldn't really see because of the low lighting conditions I was always using it in. Until I started using it in bright light I didn't notice the scratches... just a consideration if you're buying a notebook, check out the screen in bright light.