Einstein, my first desktop PC turned home server in the corner, has passed on to the great /dev/null in the sky.
When I first bought him, back in 2003, he was but a refurbished Dell Dimension 2350, with a mere 128MB of RAM. It was the fruit of a summer working for my parents. He arrived while I was at work, and I begged to go home and set him up to play with the then fun new features of Windows XP. That Christmas, I got my first real video game, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, along with a 256MB memory upgrade. Einstein could be called a gaming machine. We had great fun playing with the new Windows Movie Maker 2.0, too.
Einstein soon outgrew his integrated video adapter. I had been browsing the local computer stores for a PCI graphics card, for Einstein only had PCI, no AGP. I found a nice GeForce FX 5200 at OfficeMax for a reasonable price. I added it, and suddenly I could run games at 1024×768! It seriously brought Einstein up to current standards for the time.
Original Dimension 2350
The next great improvement was a new 120GB IDE HD and a 512MB stick of RAM, making the two slots add to 768MB, around 2006. It vastly improved storage over the 30GB stock HD that came with him. Now I could have all my games installed at once without swapping back and forth between the big ones. And, everything was much zippier.
When I purchased Galileo in 2007, Einstein started to move to a server role. He didn’t play nice with the video card anymore, which I’ve now found to be defective. I installed Ubuntu Server edition, and Einstein had new life. It was my first home server experience. I installed VMWare Server and ran some virtual machines. I also installed TeamSpeak 2, and ran a voice chat server while in games.
In his last year, he has been my NAS/Print/Remote access server, as well as a TeamSpeak 2 and TS3 server that just sat in the corner and never bothered anyone. He had solid uptime, was quiet (comparatively), and never made a fuss about updates or errors. In his final days I was contemplating reinstalling the OS, but it was so rock solid that I didn’t see the urgency. He’s in a better place now.
I’ve already began working on ghostofeinstein, a virtual machine to take over the duties that Einstein has left behind.
I’ve been setting up new and exciting things on my Linux laptop. All to get ready for another wonderful semester of learning. Well, not really. I’m mostly procrastinating on other things, like cleaning my kitchen. I’ve now set up Drivel, a product that allows you to post to a wordpress blog, such as this one, from Linux. It means that I don’t have to log in to the site every time I want to post. However, if you want pretty pictures, I have to go in and put them in after the fact. Mildly annoying, but worth not having to log in for a simple post.
So what do I have on tap for this semester? Why, many fun and exciting classes! I have Assembly programming, Random Processes, Technical Writing (yes, another English class) and Senior Design 1 (meaning I’m getting close to graduating). I hope they all go well. I spent nearly $340 on books, only 3 of them, and I’m hoping that it isn’t a rough semester.
Well, that’s all for now. Time to tackle the kitchen, I suppose.
