New Baby.

So I spent the last couple of days building myself a new computer; a skill I acquired whilst working for my former mentor at UBish. I was long overdue for a new machine, and finally decided to get one when my ex-computer started literally screaming for mercy when I tried to run this program I've written on it. My now-ex machine harkens from the days when 128 Mb was a gargantuan quantity of RAM, and a 4 Gb hard drive was huge.

So, since I was lucky enough to get a rather large tax refund this year, I decided to spend a chunk of it on this new beast of a computer.

This computer is basically a symbolic representation of the sum of all of my bad expriences with computers in the past and my attempts to remedy them. I've been plagued by hard drives that suffer complete failure for no discernible reason, and end up being unrecoverable (oddly enough, this always seems to occur within days of my next planned backup; so I usually end up losing at least a week's worth of data; something which, believe me, can be rather annoying). To prevent this, I've taken two steps: 1) the two hard drives I have installed in this computer are within two inches of four (count 'em, four) 80 mm fans, since I'm fairly certain that it's overheating that caused my previous hard drives to fail (in hindsight, putting the hard drives right next to a very hot power source may not have been the wisest decision on my part); and 2) the hard drives are RAIDed. RAID, for the non-computer savvy among you stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent, depending on who you ask) Disks. I have the two drives I've installed are set for RAID1; mirroring. In other words, everything that goes onto one hard drive get's "mirrored" onto the other. So you end up with two disk drives which are completely identical. So in order to actually lose the data on my hard drive, both of these hard drives would have to fail simultaneously. Something which, I hope, is not likely to occur. Among my other bad experiences, I lost my first processor in my old computer because it overheated. It wasn't that the fan died or that the heat sink wasn't flush with the processor, or any of the common causes. It just wasn't effective. To remedy this particular fault, I now have a heat sink the approximate size and shape of a dinner plate dominating the motherboard of my computer; and by fortuitous circumstances, the only case I could find that has the power source I need has a huge honking window on the side, so I can actually just look inside to make sure that it's working. I've also gone to a lot of trouble to make sure I have as much airflow through the case as possible. I have a total of seven fans at various locations around this computer case. According to my rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, the air in the case is replaced approximately once every three seconds.

Let's take a minute to talk about the case. Why is it that just about every computer case on the market requires lights and windows and all these funky doohickies hanging off of it? I'd frankly much rather have just the old fashioned beige computer case which holds everything I need. This one comes with all sorts of funky-ass lights all over it; which is rather annoying, frankly, but what can you do? Although, I confess, this does have the previously-mentioned benefit that I can take a look through the big-ass window on the side to make sure that the CPU cooler is working properly; so it's not all bad, I guess.

There were some parts I was able to salvage from my old computer; my CD burner, a floppy drive (which I needed to get the RAID drivers onto the computer, then decided, "what the hell, I might as well keep it"), my network card... My brother wants to get his hands on my old machine (what's left of it) to turn it into a file server. I told him that would be just fine. I'll even give him a heavily-used 13 Gb hard drive, absolutely free.