Weds. Open Thread

Ok, y’all – I bit the bullet. Since Chip, Jr. is in the closet – literally – for the foreseeable future, I’ve ordered myself a new tower. The laptop was so slow last night that it came close to driving me out of my mind. When/if the hard drive in Chip, Jr. can be salvaged, I’ll snag the things off of it that I want and then clean it up and donate it to charity.

As I did when Chip, Jr. arrived, I’ll keep y’all posted as to when the new tower comes in

6 Responses to "Weds. Open Thread"

Aresay says:

September 9, 2009 at 1:53 pm

Obama administration to pass out free cough and sneeze washable armbands to all school children. Here, LINK
Anthony says:

September 9, 2009 at 2:22 pm

So, what did you wind up ordering? Inquiring geeks want to know.
Severian says:

September 9, 2009 at 2:27 pm

Just a quick question, why have a tower at all? Unless you are a gamer chasing the ultimate graphics card of the week, it would seem a better than average laptop would give you the flexibility of moving around and the power you need. I have one non-laptop, a Shuttle machine I use for a music server, dedicated to that, that sits in the stereo cabinet.

At work, I have a Dell 4400 laptop, docking station with two DVI digital video outs, dual monitors. This is, to me, the best of all possible worlds, portability, and large screen area and outboard drive when I need to work on something that big monitors are useful for. My next home machine will be this way.

At home, I have a dLink networked disk array, two 1 TB disks in a networked housing, running RAID 1 so they backup to each other, connected to my wireless network, so either my wife or I can get access to basically unlimited storage from our laptops.
Sister Toldjah says:

September 9, 2009 at 3:55 pm

Sev, it was primarily a price issue. I couldn’t get the power and the memory (and dual CD drives, among other things) on a laptop without it carrying me over the budget for what I wanted to pay. I got what I wanted with the tower for a very good price, and didn’t have to add the cost of a monitor or speakers because the ones from Chip Jr. are still functional.

Not only that, but I’m just old school

Anthony – it’s a Dimension 546, I think, but I’ll have to check the specs when I get home. I upgraded both the memory and processor from what was “standard” with it.
LibertarianAdvocate says:

September 9, 2009 at 5:09 pm

Hoho Dean said:

“When you go to pass a really enormous bill like that the more stuff you put in, the more enemies you make, right? And the reason why tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were taking on, and that is the plain and simple truth.”

This is the truth, but only in part. See my post from July 22 Lawyers & ObamaCare: A Nice Return on Their Investment which sheds far more light on why tort reform is nowhere to be seen in any health care/coverage bills before Cong.
teqjack says:

September 9, 2009 at 10:30 pm

Heh, I ordered a new on Monday (ain’t inter-tubes great?) to replace my five-year-old. It all started late last week…

My monitor died: OK, last month I had bought a new one, and a video card for it.

Except the new video card uses a new slot arrangement. Oops. Keep using the old one. Pity, not much on-card memory so some HiDef videos pic and sound get out of sync. Fixable by converting from one codec to another, but slow and painful. And not all that important since I have very little that needs the newer codecs.

Then lost access to the external hard drive. Half my files… I fear the USB2 card I bought a couple of years ago (the computer came with USB1 ports, it is so old) failed.

Then started getting error messages on one of the internal hard drives. Naturally, the one with the operating-system partition. Oh-oh!

Time to upgrade. So I bought. Which of course meant that it went on sale elsewhere the next day (Tuesday), but I am used to that.

And to Severian – I have bought desktops (which of course reside on the floor, my actual work surface holds monitor/keyboard/mouse*, much like a laptop footprint) because they are easier to change, starting with the first one I bought – before there were consumer laptops/handhelds – because I could get a 1200Baud (that is 0.0012Megabits, a far cry from my current 0.728 or 728K: I’ve been at this a while) to replace the included-with-the-box standard 300Baud.

– – –
*the latter two are radio-frequency, ie cordless: no I do not have cords all over the desk. The floor, now, well, … yeah.

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