Archive for the 'gadgets' Category

New PCs

Published on June 1, 2003 in gadgets. 0 Comments

Well, Wayde and I are both up and running with our new pc’s. Yay! My old system is downstairs in the basement serving as a place for storage and an extra gaming system. It still has XP on it (and it’ll probably stay that way) so we can Remote Desktop into it — we’re lazy and don’t want to have to walk downstairs if we need to. Ha!

Two things are left to do: Take back the crappy speakers I have and upgrade to the ones Wayde has. I got cheaper speakers and, man, does it ever sound different. When I first listened to them I was astounded by how crappy they sound. Wayde is also taking back the DVD player he got with his. It wouldn’t install his current favorite game from CD, even though the CD worked fine on other computers in the house. He took the DVDROM out of my old system so he’s taking back the new one and getting a plain ol’ CDROM to put in it’s place.

I got Morrowind for the PC with my video card. Woot! We have it for the X-Box and have recently got back into playing it (somehow we stopped around the time I got pregnant, but now that we’re at home more, it’s become our fave again). So I installed it on my PC just to check out how it played and see how my new vid card holds up….Dood. It rocks. I think I might just play it on my computer now.:) Of course, I still have my character on X-Box, but it’s not going anywhere. Sometimes I’m stuck in the basement with Brucie feeding or sleeping, so I can catch up on it then if I want.

I took a couple of screenshots from Morrowind during my test run. Here’s my new desktop.

homedesktop.jpg

K, I’ve got some playin’ to do before Bruce wakes up!

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Yep, I really am a geek.

Published on May 30, 2003 in family, gadgets and geekiness. 0 Comments

So Wayde and I are being irresponsible. We decided that on the Irresponsibility Scale of 1 to 10, it’s about a 5 — not as bad as showing up to work drunk and accidentally breaking the domain controller, but worse than forgetting walk the dog.

We’re both getting new computers. Kick-ass ones at that. With the prices of systems coming down these days, well, we figured we had better get on it right away if we’re going to make any money selling off our old ones. We have four computers, Wayde and I each have one and we have two extra set up in the basement for gaming/learning/etc. We’re selling the two in the basement, plus selling Wayde’s, and putting that money back on the credit card. (Yay, Airmiles!)

Wayde, of course, is keeping his kick-ass video card I got him a few weeks ago. But he needs a new monitor so we’re getting him a 19″ Samsung flat-screen that’s on special. I don’t need a monitor, I’ve got a cool 19″ Viewsonic, but I do need a video card so I’m getting one of those — the same exact one Wayde has, cuz it’s cool.

Both of our systems are basically the same:
NVIDIA Geforce4 – 128M and damn near the best out right now
Asus A7V8X-X motherboard – new nForce chipset that’s supposed to be awesome
Athlon XP CPU – 1.8G, overclockable
40G HD 7200RPM
512M RAM (PC333 DDR SDRAM)

The only real difference is that Wayde is getting a DVD drive and I’m getting a DVD/CDRW. We figure we only need one and I’m selling my old external USB CD-RW (link is to the internal one, but it’s the same model).

My computer is going in the basement. We’ll be using it as a “server” of sorts. I’ve got two 20G hard drives and we already use the second for storage, so we’ll continue to do that but it will now also serve as an extra gaming system and system for learning on.

Speaking of learning… I installed VMWare on my system the other day (after reloading the whole damn thing) and successfully installed RedHat 9 through it. VMWare rocks! If you ever want to test out an OS, but don’t want to go through the hassle of dual-boot, use VMWare. It’s cool. So anyway, I installed RedHat and since it’s basically running at the same time XP is running, I can pop out of it and surf Google for any questions I might have, and believe me, I’ve already had quite a few.

Maybe that geek test was right.

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