Here's a story that's an new twist on a familiar news story, but instead of "dog," think "motherboard,", replace "man" with "jjohn" and "bites" with "destroys." That's right after years of replacing my own computer hardware, I have destroyed my main Window's PC. I lay the blame for this incident on a power supply with a soft switch. The bastard sprang to life as I was removing a video card. You say "why didn't you unplug the machine before opening the box?" To which I reply, I did the other 99 times. Actually, I thought I had unplugged it that time. I was very surprised to see the CPU fan start moving!
Anyway, now I need to decide what I'm going to do about this. My Window's box was both my gaming platform and my TV. I will try to use one of my linux boxes for TV and I might have to content myself with Atari 2600 games, which is ok by me. Should I replace that box with a MacOS X box? A new Linux box? Another Windows box?
Have you got a really bone-headed hardware story? Do share!
[update: This incident forced me to finally get one of my TV tuner cards to work under Linux. I'm using xawtv and it works ok. It's unstable in a completely different way than the W2K version, so that's new. I think I can live with this for a while. At least until Farscape comes back on the air.]
I was just trying to add another 40 GB drive to my computer when I finally discovered that I didn't have a spare 4-pin connecter anywhere! Doh! All the other cables are used on other stuff. I'll probably end up just switching out the old hard drive with the new one, but I was hoping to use both. I'm gonna hold off for a while, though.
Ah, well. I needed to pull out the Creative DVD drive anyway, which crapped out after less than 6 months. That didn't impress me. Second one in 2 1/2 years, no less. It also gave me a chance to clean out the orange juice I spilled down the front cover one day. I'm still finding little bits of dried up orange juice - a year and a half later.
As for what you should do, I'd hold off on a Mac. The G5's are supposed to be out soon, and I'd hate to see you wishing that you had waited. If you can wait until then, buy a Mac (I'm planning on getting one, probably next year).
As for a Linux box versus a Windows box - why do you need separate machines? Why not just split the hard drive? Or, perhaps run WINE within Linux?
The crappy Linux tv tuners are one reason I didn't keep Linux around on my home machine (space was another). I've got the ATI All-In-Wonder myself. Hell, even BeOS had a *couple* of good tuner apps for my card.
Re:Ouch
jjohn on 2002-02-18T13:42:29
The G5's are supposed to be out soon, and I'd hate to see you wishing that you had waited.
Good point. Another good point is that I don't feel like spending more than $1000 on a machine. I normally buy really low end machines. That way, I don't care when they explode. Had I done this to an Apple, or even a new Dell, I would have been really pissed.
As for a Linux box versus a Windows box - why do you need separate machines? Why not just split the hard drive? Or, perhaps run WINE within Linux?
I gave up dual booting long ago. The combination of cheap machines and a KVM box makes it easy to access different OS's at once. I tried out WINE less than 6 months ago it's about as stable as the Linux TV tuners. I do have VMWare, but my celeron machines don't have enough horsepower to machine those sessions useful for anything but ASP programming. I make my living writing about and programming for Linux, so I'll have a Linux box around for the foreseeable future. I hate to admit it, but I find the challenge of making Desktop linux run, er, fun.
I have hope that the video4linux project will deliver a quality tuner app soon. I need to do more homework in this area.
Thanks for your input!
Re:Ouch
pudge on 2002-02-18T14:05:32
Yeah, I was gonna say, you aren't exactly in the market for the G5. The G5, if it exists, is for people who do multimedia for a living, or like to have the latest and greatest Just Because.
If you want Mac OS X, though, you *will* want a G4, though you might be able to get away with 500+ MHz G3, and 256 MB RAM. And you can get a used G3/500 Mac for under $1000. But I'd really suggest looking into a G4, which'll put you over. And make sure whatever you get that it's well-supported by Mac OS X (I think all G3s are, but I am not entirely sure).
Replace with a linux box running freeciv.
I'm with you on the Atari 2600 games! I've seen rumors that Stella, the 2600 emulator, is soon to be GPL'ed. Toying with the idea of building one of these but totally differently, with an embedded system running Stella.
Re:Replacement
jdavidb on 2002-02-18T18:19:23
Ack! I meant one of these.
Note to self: after clicking "preview," remember to actually change the mistakes.
