Hardware

I purchased an ASUS Eee PC 900A a few weeks ago and I found myself using it more than my main system.

A few weeks ago I purchased an ASUS EeePC 900A and I absolutely love the little netbook.
The default Xandros install was horrible. It mounts the file systems under UnionFS which blocks you from upgrading the packages as it effectively eats up all disk space if you try it.

Needless to say, Xandros got wiped off the system faster than I was initially going to remove it.

While going through my closet today I made a nice discovery which consisted of a box full of old motherboards, their corresponding processors, and some random cards.

After sorting through everything on the table I really wished that I had a some spare cases laying around because if I combined these with some of the other parts that I have laying about I would have a complete 8088 system, a bunch of 468s, and a Pentium II & III system.

As someone with a soft spot for out-dated hardware I have a tendency to acquire and fix unwanted machines so that they can be useful one again. My most recent project was definately no exception to the rule.

It was a filthy Apple //e Enhanced computer that had years of grime and some ball point pen markings tracing around its edges. Aside from that though it was in pretty good shape and I am fairly pleased at how well it cleaned up (even though I couldn't get some of the pen marks completely off of the case).

I finally got around to replacing my aging multimedia setup that consisted of an Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 SB0100 sound card combined with a Cambridge SoundWorks (Creative) DeskTop Theater 5.1 DTT2200 speaker system.

Having been a loyal Creative customer that has used their products since the days of the Sound Blaster 16, I had wanted to wait until the Sound Blaster X-Fi had proper drivers for GNU/Linux before making any major upgrades again.

The CRT monitor which was part of my dual screen setup finally become bad enough to warrant a replacement and after some thought I have decided to move away from a dual screen configuration to a single wide screen LCD with a resolution of 1680x1050.

Even though I obviously lost screen space in the transition away from a combined resolution of 2560x1024, I have to say that overall I am quite pleased with the change.

How many of you out there hate to see aging computers go to waste?
I guess you could say that I have a bit of available soft spot for them because I have a habit of acquiring these machines from people and fixing them up when necessary so they can be put right back into service.

I personally have two older machines that I use on a constant basis.

A 400MHz Arch Linux powered system with a 160GB hard drive serves as the file and streaming audio server for my house.

I don't know what it is but I seem to have the worst luck when it comes to hard drives these days.

The Western Digital 160GB Caviar SE that I bought in March to replace my last dead drive decided it was going to fail on me last night with a Read Element Failure. It is always great to hear the heart warming sound of the click of death.

This makes it the third hard drive to fail in a row over a span of the past two years and I always have a fan blowing on it so it wasn't a case of overheating.

There is never a reason why you shouldn't be continually backing up your data.
You never know when your hard drive is going to fail on you and I was the lucky pick of the draw yesterday.

This was the second 120GB Maxtor drive to die in recent years, so I decided to purchase an Western Digital 160GB Caviar SE (WD1600JB-00R) for my new drive. I have another 160GB Caviar SE (WD1600JB-00DUA3) in my file server and haven't had any problems with it so I figured it was worth a shot.