As you, my faithful and loyal readers, will recall, my computer died a few weeks ago. It was a sad day, and many tears were shed for my faithful companion. But the work must go on, the money must be earned, the video games must be played, and most importantly, the blog posts must resume. Well, the recovery process is now complete. At least, complete enough that I can work again.
- New computer built and running! - Check
- Email up and running! - Check
- VM Ware Workstation installed and running! - Check!
- Ubuntu up and running! - Check
- Windows development environement up and running! - Check
- Geek quotient set to high! - Check
Let me just say, I love my new computer. As geeky things go, this machine kicks proverbial ass! If you want to know more about the machine, then please feel free to indulge in the geek content below the fold.
Ok, this machine rocks hard. I used a Stiker Extreme Motherboard from Asus, and I am pretty happy with it. It hasn’t been a perfect experience, but all in all I am very happy. I setup a +900Gb RAID 5 with Windows XP Profesional SP2 as a Host OS. I then used VMWare Workstation to install several Guest OS’s to seperate work from personal, as well as to enhance the security and reliability of the overall system. To round out the system, I installed the new Intel Kentsfield 2.5GHz Quad Core Processor, 2Gb of RAM, an EVGA 8800GTX graphics card, and a 24″ Widescreen Monitor.
This overall combination rocks. As a stress test, I connected 3 virtual machines and ran World of Warcraft in windowed mode. I barely pushed the system resources past 25% utilization. That makes me feel pretty good about the future lifecycle prospects of this particular build.
By ensuring that the development enviornment is kept in it’s own virtual machine, I have ensured easy backup and system portability. Any computer with VMWare Player and 512Mb of RAM can play host to my development machine. This means that I can continue the “work from anywhere” philosophy that I am trying to maintain. In fact, I have to say, the VMWare thing is one of the coolest pieces of software I have ever played with.
