As is always the case with Christmas, I have had a series of changes in my computers over the span of the last few days. The biggest change is that I’ve upgraded the video card in my primary desktop computer, Fozzie. The new video card is an XFX GeForce 7300GT, replacing the existing PNY Verto […]
As an early birthday present, today I upgraded my current 15″ LCD monitor to a 19″ Samsung SyncMaster 940BX monitor. This new monitor is absolutely amazing — 1000:1 contrast ratio, 5ms response time, no dead pixels, adjustable height, and can be rotated. Those are feature normally found in very high-end monitors. This replaces a 15″ […]
Another series of not-too-interesting computer part swaps amongst my computers. Waldorf was without a sound card, while Fozzie had two (a Sound Blaster Live as well as the on-board sound on the motherboard, which is actually rather good). So I took the SB Live card from Fozzie and put it in Waldorf, and am currently […]
Nothing too interesting has been happening with my computers, but there have been several swaps of parts between my computers. First, the wireless NIC I had been using in Fozzie was removed, and installed instead into my fiance’s computer. Fozzie now is back to using its on-board wired LAN. My fiance and I are moving […]
Unlike most people, I really do like touchpads on laptops. I think they’re an intuitive way to use a pointing device. Because of this, I’ve exclusively used the touchpad on Camilla in the time I have had this laptop. However, once in a while, I really do a lot of work in one sitting on […]
The other day, my Cyber Power uninterruptible power supply suffered a horrible death. We lost power for just a moment, but rather than supplying power to Fozzie through the loss, it shut the computer off. Then, when the power came back, the UPS would maintain power to the computer for about 3 seconds, then drop […]
As mentioned in my previous post, my old Labtec headset, which I’ve had since 2000, broke recently. So I have now replaced it, with a Plantronics MX-505 headset. It’s interesting to note that this new headset is actually designed for mobile phones, which use a 2.5mm headset jack. I’m able to attach it to my […]
There has been a flurry of small changes with my computers lately. First, I recently decided to take the wireless NIC (a new Linksys WMP54G) from Waldorf and put it in Fozzie. I built Waldorf mostly to try and use the old parts I had hanging around, as well as to have a Linux-only desktop. […]
Today I upgraded Camilla to Fedora Core 4. The only reason she was running Core 3 was that, as of July, I couldn’t get wireless networking to work under Core 4. But since then I’ve gotten it working — largely because of building Waldorf. This was actually just part of re-building the operating systems on […]
Today I added one 1GB module of Crucial PC3200 RAM to Fozzie, bringing Fozzie’s total to 1.5GB of RAM. 1.5GB is quite a lot of memory for a desktop system, so you might wonder why I added 1GB rather than, say, 512MB. The reason is, even though the Asus K8V motherboard has three slots for […]