Josh Saddler

The first parts for my new machine are on the way.

Grand total, not including tax/shipping: $1631.84. Could have saved $200 if I'd shopped a month or two ago, but not everything was in stock then. At least this is everything, from the monitor to case to ESD strap to my home-brewed silent fan mounts (weatherstripping + cable ties). For comparison, this Pentium3 laptop, when it was the top-of-the-line laptop 5 years ago, cost over $3000, including all the nifty extras bundled with it. And now it's a piece of junk, though a trusty piece of junk. (Admittedly, it can be quite cantankerous and ornery at times.)

And what is this wondrously-priced workstation? A quiet dual-core socket AM2 Athlon64! X2 4600+ (no more 36-hour compile times!), 4GB DDR2, 2x Samsung in RAID1, plus a third smaller Seagate for testing, installation, and non-Linux OSes. Will probably put G/FBSD on there, too.

Actually, can anyone who uses Gentoo as their main workstation tell me if 4GB RAM is noticeably better than 2GB? DDR2 prices have shot way up over the last several months; now it's usually >$200 for 2GB.

Will also have a low to midrange graphics card, a passively cooled nVidia GeForce 7600GT. Should last another 5 years before my next upgrade, and it can drive the 19" widescreen monitor, although setting 1440x900 in Xorg probably won't be fun. :/

Anyway, my plans are to make this a fairly future-proof box, as I want at least another three years before I make any upgrades to it. Should be right in line with AMD's planned socket AM3-CPU-on-AM2-socket move, and should remain compatible whenever quad core chips come out (if I "need" one). Have also designed it around quiet low-power components, as I don't want something as noisy as this ancient laptop. My ears, my ears!

With all this extra computing power, I plan to scrounge up the free time to study more to become an ebuild developer and lend a hand to another project or two.

Speaking of free time, in a week I'll have some more, as I just quit the overnight job so that I can focus on the daytime library job. Working night and day jobs is a real killer -- after 11 months at the bookstore, I finally realized that my body can't keep up with not sleeping for 72 straight hours every week. I quit for my own health, so now I'm in the market for another job, at least until things get better at the library, since it's not full-time.