Thursday, November 26, 2009
11-26-2009 - Straight Trippin'
Woke up this morning to work in the shop a bit before turkey and found the old GFCI had tripped again with nothing connected to it. It must be replaced. I don't want that happening when I'm in the middle of a render job some fine day, making me lose half my farm.
Friday, November 20, 2009
So long, piece of shit computer.
I've been growing both wary and weary of my workshop computer. The hard disk is old, loud and 40GB small. I don't put anything on it because I'm afraid I'll lose the data when it finally dies. That's about to change.
A while ago, I bought a ThinkPad T60 for my wife from a fellow [H]ard|Forum member. I liked it so much I decided I needed one for myself so when he put more up for grabs, I bit. Mine came with the 9 cell battery, a Kensington lock cable and a mini docking station. Mini docking station? Those are routinely lame. Not with Lenovo.
It's got every port my workshop computer has and then some.
I'm moving my entire operation to the T60.
Better still, one of the LNXI compute nodes was packed with a nice Lenovo keyboard while the other two came with Dell keyboards. I'm typing this post on it right now--hooked to the crap computer.
While the workshop computer's hard disk is noisy and the noise is far from consistent, the biggest annoyance I have with the machine isn't the hard drive. It's the cooling fans. The CPU cooler is a Thermaltake Volcano 6cu that spins at something like 8000RPM and the video card is a BFG GeForce FX5900 Ultra with a squirrel cage blower that sounds like a dustbuster.
I don't expect to be able to hear what's happening outside while working in the shop when the server farm is running. I do, however, expect to hear what's going on when it's not since I have no windows.
While the computer has been a pain in the ass, the core of it may serve a purpose in the future. I'm trying to sell off some computers, but nobody seems to be buying anything they have to do a bit of work on. No matter. I can strip the internals out of all of them, bolt the motherboards together and run them as a small cluster, selling the cases and Windows XP stickers to cover the cost of adding memory. 512MB is too small. I need a gig in each one. I'll worry about all of that after I get the server farm running, however, since my workshop computer's CPU is only capable of completing the Yafaray benchmark in half an hour and each of the ten nodes in this potential cluster is slightly slower still.
A while ago, I bought a ThinkPad T60 for my wife from a fellow [H]ard|Forum member. I liked it so much I decided I needed one for myself so when he put more up for grabs, I bit. Mine came with the 9 cell battery, a Kensington lock cable and a mini docking station. Mini docking station? Those are routinely lame. Not with Lenovo.
It's got every port my workshop computer has and then some.
I'm moving my entire operation to the T60.
Better still, one of the LNXI compute nodes was packed with a nice Lenovo keyboard while the other two came with Dell keyboards. I'm typing this post on it right now--hooked to the crap computer.
While the workshop computer's hard disk is noisy and the noise is far from consistent, the biggest annoyance I have with the machine isn't the hard drive. It's the cooling fans. The CPU cooler is a Thermaltake Volcano 6cu that spins at something like 8000RPM and the video card is a BFG GeForce FX5900 Ultra with a squirrel cage blower that sounds like a dustbuster.
I don't expect to be able to hear what's happening outside while working in the shop when the server farm is running. I do, however, expect to hear what's going on when it's not since I have no windows.
While the computer has been a pain in the ass, the core of it may serve a purpose in the future. I'm trying to sell off some computers, but nobody seems to be buying anything they have to do a bit of work on. No matter. I can strip the internals out of all of them, bolt the motherboards together and run them as a small cluster, selling the cases and Windows XP stickers to cover the cost of adding memory. 512MB is too small. I need a gig in each one. I'll worry about all of that after I get the server farm running, however, since my workshop computer's CPU is only capable of completing the Yafaray benchmark in half an hour and each of the ten nodes in this potential cluster is slightly slower still.
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