Starport: state of the silicon

According to this year's to.do file, the last time I upgraded a computer in the house was early last February. This may be some kind of personal record. The computer in question was Nova, the main fileserver.

The last computer actually purchased was Colleen's EeePC, last May for Mother's Day. Meanwhile, I've returned Matrix (Kat's old 300MHz Thinkpad from High School) to service as my living-room workstation. The lid is cracked near the left-hand hinge, the battery is shot, and the performance sucks, but it's (barely) adequate as a web browser and X terminal, and it has a small footprint and a keyboard I can type on.

Harmony, my main workstation in the office, is functional but has a noisy CPU fan, and doesn't have enough horsepower for serious audio editing. Meanwhile Dorsai, the bedroom workstation/recording box, does have the horsepower but isn't being used much except for backups: my work habits have changed considerably, and I haven't done any home recording to speak of this year. (Field recording, with the Zoom H2, has been happening.)

The three old Fry's boxen are limping along: one in the Y.D.'s room, one in the bedroom as Colleen's email machine, and one spare. Dantooine, a fanless Mini-ITX box in the office, is the main guest machine.

Also at my disposal are the XO (currently underutilized), and a Macbook Pro and EeePC at work.

The only 64-bit machines in the house are Nova and Dorsai. Did I mention that Nova's disk is 95% full? That would be fixable by moving the Debian mirror to another drive -- I do not want to upgrade from 500GB to 1TB drives until they get under $100.

Money is tight this year. It'll be even tighter next year. Upgrading Harmony will cost something in the $200-300 range for new CPU, motherboard, and RAM. Maybe.

I can probably get the most bang for free by moving Dorsai into the office and using the XO (with a USB keyboard and an upgrade to Lenny) as the living-room machine. The other possibility is putting Dorsai on a cart to shuttle between the living room and the bedroom; that would require either cash or carpentry.

More later, perhaps. PSA: party at the Starport TODAY!