Windows Suicide

My Windows box, the dual PIII 1Ghz machine with the ECS DV6AA motherboard blew up last Friday. It popped some capacitors. Don't know if it was due to heat, age or anything, but it wouldn't function. I stripped it down to bare metal today and found that there was no current getting to CPU1, although CPU2 was ok. Now, I clearly have two options here: 1. get a new socket 370 motherboard (at a cost of two to five hundred dollars) to use my existing RAM and processors, 2. get a P4 mobo plus new RAM (at a cost of a few thousand dollars).

Duh! I'll pick up a new S370 mobo at some point soon. There's actually no rush. I installed RedHat 9 on gizmo, my Linux box. I spent some time on Saturday getting full graphics acceleration to work. I can do almost everything on gizmo that I needed a windows box for before. The only thing I can't do is run Excel VBA macros. Otherwise, gizmo with RH9 is a superb desktop machine.

I am very impressed with RH9 - it's the best Linux for a desktop machine I've ever seen. It does require a little bit of work setting up, but then, I'm a professional Linux admin, so it's pretty damn easy for me. The fonts and the XFree86 4.3.0 work really well, although getting them to work with a Matrox G400 takes some time. (check out the forums at http://www.matrox.com/mga to find out some useful information.)

I absolutely need to be able to work from home at the moment. To do somethings, like log into my linux boxes from outside, I need Terminal Services. Happily, RH9 has rdesktop, and I can do everything from home that I can from work. Plus, the coffee's better! (And I have some of my own homemade bread too!)