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a hint about my brain

Well it's now a real live blog (well might be ;) )

Friday, February 02, 2007

Favour for Neil Gaiman

So in the war currently going in between Neil and his friend Penn Jillette Neil's asked reader of his blog to link to a post and give it the link text of Penn Jillette.

See this link for more info.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Upgrading my computer

Well as my old computer was making odd noises and would lose the bios setting if I turned it off for any length of time (like overnight), and also as Quake 4 would just stop in some places I decided it might be time to look at upgrading.

Old setup P4 2.? processor 1.5GB DDR memory, an ATI Radeon 9800 pro with 128MB, and 3 disks 1 very old 16GB ide 66 or 33, 1 60GB ide 133 (or maybe 66) and 1 150GB SATA 1 drive. Oh all of this is running Suse 10.0 with KDE.

New set up AMD 64 x2 4200+ with 1GB DDR2 ram, and ATI x1600 with 512MB. New motherboard is a MSI K9N SLI. All of this I got second hand from a friend from work.

As the 12Gb just had windows on it (which wouldn't boot and I never needed to fix it) and was a possible cause of odd noises this was a good candidate to n0t be moved across. Which was good as the new motherboard had one ide connector so I had the 60GB as master and my dvd as secondary, not great but I needed the 60GB as it had all my mp3 on it, and not enough room on the SATA.

Anyway the hardware installation was easy. I have a 20 pin power supply which I was slightly concerned about plugging in it into the 24 port motherboard, but after reading the manual (yes it does happen) I found out it was fine. So cool.
And it booted first time which is alway nice.

Software: Well seeing as most of my partitions has changed from hdb to hda I had to change the fstab file to point to the new settings.


Suse 10.0 then booted fine. Sound didn't work and I couldn't get the ati drive to work for 3d graphics. After a bit of checking and also as Suse 10.0 has an bit of an issue with USB2 I decided to install Suse 10.2.

In Linux it generally a good idea to have a seperate partition for home so you can wipe the root partition but keep all your setting and personal data. Anyway I have this so bunged Suse 10.2 on, I picked Gnome this time as I prefer the new Novell Gnome menu to the new KDE one. I added KTorrent and it found all my ongoing Torrents and continue downloading them.

Amarok I prefer to Helix as an music player so that got added as well. Again as all settings are held in a hidden directory under home it brought all my settings over. I had to repoint the library as it had changed from hdb to hda.

The ATI driver was a bit of a pain (and to be honest I'm not sure how I fixed it but it's working so that's cool) and XGL (cool new spinning cube stuff) doesn't support the x1600 yet, but Cedega (World of Warcraft runs very nicely) works fine, and Quake 4 and Doom3 runs really well at 1268 x 1024 at Ultimate quality.

Oh and while this isn't a Linux v Vista post (that'll be later) I would have had to re-activate Vista if I have changed this amount of hardware. So ringing up and getting it re-activated. Huge pain.

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