Well, an interesting weekend. It started out with a memory upgrade (it was on sale) so I boosted my ram from 640MB to 1.2GB on my machine. We also decided to replace my oldest daughter's pc (a pentium 300MHz celeron). My youngest already has a decent machine to use (it was one I picked up for using Kylix but that would be a different story for another day). I have had a hate on for this machine since we got it for her but it continued to work through thick and thin but was really showing it's age in the past year or so. So, we bit the bullet and picked up a cheap (hmm, isn't that relative to your current mood) replacement. Well, that started off an interesting weekend...
My wife and I discussed what would be small/big enough and came to the conclusion that a celeron would be suitable for my girl's uses. My wife made the very observant comment that I had said I would never pick up another celeron again (the one I purchased for Kylix was a celeron). I conceded that I wouldn't buy another one from my use and she let me off the hook on that little bit of history.
So, all is well, my wife goes and picks a pc for my daughter, arrives home, and I start the work to get the pc on the network and get the web page blocking stuff in place. While I am sitting there
enjoying the pleasures of downloading yet another service pack she mentions that she saw a decent price on a new Intel 3.0GHz with hyperthreading (for histories sake I have been trying to convince myself to purchase a dual cpu for the last 3/4 years but always end up going for a high end single instead). She mentions this because over the last three weeks I have retired two other machine (my daughter's will be the 3rd) for hardware failures and other related issues. So, I was feeling the loss of available machines for testing this and that. This ends up with her back at the store picking up this machine. While at the store she sees an 18 inch flat panel for a really good deal and give me a call (if anyone thinks I am going to say no at this point you have to be kidding). She reminds me that the memory is still on sale. The machine only came with 512MB of ram so we picked up another 1GB to give it a bit of a boost.
Alright, now, by the time my wife gets back I have my daughter's machine taken care of and she is merrily browsing
www.pbskids.org so I can now get down to the nitty gritty of getting my new main machine up and running...
Up to this point everything has been a ton of fun (other then the pain of giving that money away) since it is hard to not be happy at seeing a bunch of new shiny toys. But there has to be a catch doesn't there... now my memory comes back to clearly remind me of the horror of setting up a new machine so that you actually have all the tools you need to function (and bill clients). So, I slap down Windows 2003 Server (have been looking for an excuse to really use this version), Oracle, VS.Net, SQL Server, Office Tools, and Delphi 6, 7, and 8, and any other tools I needed. Other than talking a very long time to install all that software it really went exceptionally well. No hardware errors, no OS errors, and other then Delphi 6 everything installed without a hickup. For Delphi 6 I have apparently exceeded my install attempts so now I have to call Borland to tell them to increment the # of installs I am allowed todo.
One funny point (well, actually two) during this is the machine is sitting on the floor with the cover off. It has three fans and I have two cats... one of the cats figures that while I am so involved in setting up software I wouldn't notice it stepping inside the running machine and poking around... it wasn't until I heard the 3rd "bzzzzzz" sound that I noticed the cat was having an extremely good time with the fans (whiskers and paws make a wonderful sound). I will be honest, the thought of trying to take the machine back after just a few hours because it got shorted out by my cat didn't appeal to me (and I woudn't want anything bad to happen to the cat either). After sternly getting the cat away from the box I went back to the task at hand. A few hours later I am telling my wife about the cat (that received a quick white face... I think she was more concerned about the cat then the computer). We both get a chuckle out of it and lo and behold doesn't the cat decide to do it yet one more time while we are both there just to get the point across that if I leave it open they will come.
So, to start Monday off I am on a new machine and actually getting some paying work done, the box has been secured from cat attack, both of my daughters have decent machines to surf and play on. My old machine will sit there for a while as I extract files from it on a as needed basis. I will reshape it into a linux or windows server for various purposes at some distint point in the future... for now it can relax and only needs to serve files to me. The only downturn of the weekend is my wife noting that she now has the slowed machine (and my only remaining laptop). I will have to manage expectations on that one ;).
