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Not a very productive day. I’m on a deadline, so sat down to do some writing and decided to switch keyboards so that the better one is on my Linux machine, which I use for the majority of my writing. That meant the old PS/2 one had to go in the Windows machine.

It didn’t like that. At all. In fact, it threw a massive strop. I switched it on, there was some buzzing, then a bang, and a small cloud of smoke. That’s the second time I’ve blown a power supply in that machine. The Linux machine, meanwhile, pootles along with its out-of-date hardware. The processor is slow, the amount of memory laughable, and the graphics card barely passable, but it’s stable, and quiet, and it works very well. Far better than the newer P4 running Windows.

Which meant a trip to PC World. Can’t say I ever relish that. At least our local one seems to be fairly organised, though, and they have the Apple computers plugged in, switched on a running something useful.

All I wanted was a new power supply, but I decided to replace the keyboard for a USB one in the end (PS/2 is so out of date now), and threw in a new heatsink and fan to try and quieten things down a bit.

A bit of rebuilding later, all seems to be running well, and is certainly a lot quieter than before. As a bizarre aside, I now also have a blue neon glow peeping out from under the desk as though I’m sitting at a low-slung modded XR3i. I think this must be an overclocker’s power supply, which probably explains the lovely chrome casing. I can quite understand why people get so excited about see-through cases now.

I’m wondering whether it’s time to upgrade the Linux box now, though. It’s a painfully slow processor, and although it runs the OS just fine OpenOffice is having terrible trouble with its dictionary. There are some good monitor-less sub-

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 8th, 2005 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.