Its Alive!

Posted on Tue 02 November 2004 by alex in general

I was being vaguely conscientious before I headed to Whitby at the weekend by shutting down my desktop PC at home. When I tried to power it up yesterday evening I got the entertaining noise of the disk drives heads trying to play a percussion piece. I forced myself not to think about having old backups and went to bed rather than stay up
late trying to fix things.

Luckily this morning when the room was warmer, the moon in correct alignment and with baited breath I got the thing to boot up again. The CD burner will be working hard to ensure I've got an up to date set of backups however I think its time to get a new machine.


If I can get a pre-built bare bones system I'll probably go for that. I already have various additional components such as DVD writers so I'm looking for something like:

  • Tower case

    • Decent Power Supply (400W+)
    • Spare Drive Bays (at least 1 DVD/CDRW, at least 2 additional HD bays)
    • Modern styling a bonus

  • CPU/Motherboard

    • 2Ghz+, preferably an Athalon, possibly 64 bit if price not too great
    • At least 3 memory slots
    • AGP Graphics slot, at least 3 PCI slots
    • USB 2.0, 2xRS232 ports
    • Linux supported chipset (in practice any major chipset)

  • Memory: at least 1Gb

  • Graphics: 3D acceleration with open source drivers (ATI
    9250?)

  • HD: At least 100Gb, decent fast drive

  • Software: None, I don't want to pay M$ tax!


And finally to all those across the pond. Although I have my opinions on who would be better in the White House its not my place to tell you who to vote for. However I do hope that everyone who is eligible to vote in the US elections exercises their democratic responsibility.