I had to get this blog out of the way before I reach the end of my "honeymoon" with the Mac OS X. This coming April 26, 2007, I will be celebrating my 1st month using my very first and only Mac OS X system – the Macbook 13" 2 GHz. In that upcoming blog, I will talk about my ups and downs with the MAC OS X and my decision whether to stay with it or return to being a purely Windows PC user. In this blog, I will show what I will be returning to in the event that I decide to ditch the Mac OS X. The article below I just happened to unearth from my MS OneNote files. OneNote shows that I actually wrote this article on Feb 10, 2005.
Last January 2005, I assembled my slick and super cool (literally) desktop cum server which has proven to be a top class performer. With its water-cooled 64 bit AMD architecture and a whopping 800 gig RAID 1 & JBOD configuration, this monster has been able to handle anything and everything I have thrown at it. Let us first have a look at the insides:
Most of the parts where ordered either from TIGERDIRECT or AMAZON except for the Cooler master case, the Aqua cool water cooling system, the power supply and the ATI RADEON 9800XT AGP 256mb video card. The latter items just happened to be available locally. The following where the items ordered online:
It took about a week for the components to arrive from the date of order. The items where shipped 1st to the Johnny Air Cargo (JAC) office in New York City then delivered to my doorsteps by the ever reliable people of JAC. Did I mention they were all tax free?
From the time I gathered all the components to the time I finally got everything running took around two days. Most of the time was used figuring out how to combine all 4 hard drives into a RAID 1 and JBOD (just a bunch of hard drives) configuration. But the entire wait was well worth it when everything was assembled. Here, take a look.
How fast is this computer you might ask? In my 3 year old P4 3.06 2 gig RAM computer, Adobe Photoshop takes around 13 seconds to initialize. With this setup, Photoshop opens up in about 2 seconds.
This computer will be my main workstation for the next 2 years or so. It has been running flawlessly for the last 4 weeks with not a single hiccup. I can say without batting an eyelash that this supercomputer definitely fulfills my NEED FOR SPEED.
If you ask me now if I will ever again buy a branded desktop computer, my response will be a definite "HELL NO."
Well, that was me talking more than two years ago. Today, my dream machine has significantly slowed down more from the garbage (software) that I have loaded into it than anything else. I can say that I am still happy with this old PC desktop running XP. That is why today, I have decided to keep it for another year by upgrading its processor and RAM. I ordered a 2.6 GHz AMD Dual Core Opteron and another two sticks of RAM to make a total of 4 gig.
This will be the last upgrade for my already obsolete socket 939 Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard. When the items arrive I will do a total OS reinstall of Windows XP. I know that I could easily squeeze 1 more year from it with this reinvigorated setup. Why not install Vista? Because it was all because of Vista that I decided to buy my very first Macintosh. We have installed Vista in 3 other computers at work and all of them suffer from intermittent lock ups for reasons we still couldn't fathom. The same is true with the LE 1600 after installing Vista.
This XP machine will definitely remain as my main workhorse. Although it is also connected to the web, I don't do emails on it since that is done exclusively on the mobile which at present is the Macbook 13" for reasons I have explained here.
In my next blog, find out if the "Techno cop Command Center" will return to being an exclusively Windows environment, or continue to be hybrid.
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