Holy crap.. I’ve been busy for so long that my own login cookie expired!
Suffice to say that between Spacesystems Design, Advanced Mechanics of Structures, and Spacecraft Dynamics its been a brutal few weeks at Skule. I’m now in somewhat of a brief respite, you could say a lull before the storm of Midterms. Once Midterms start, I don’t lift my head from the books until I get home at Christmas time.
I am currently looking at buying a new computer system. My current system is woefully underpowered, being a 1.5GB AthlonXP 2500+ that I built the summer before first year (for those counting, that means its nearly 4.5 years old). A friend of mine has given me the option of buying a Lenovo ThinkPad through the “Family/Friends Employee Purchase Program”, which basically offers me a discount between 15-30% on ThinkPads (it varies depending on the model). I’ve wanted a laptop for some time, so I looked into it and picked one out. I couldn’t pay for it last night, however, because I have to wait for my credit card payment to go through before I have enough space on it.
Well that was a big mistake, because now I’m not so sure I want a laptop. I’ve been pricing out building myself a desktop from the local computer shoppe and I’ve come to the conclusion that I could build a pretty good system, with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700, 4GB RAM, and something along the lines of an nVidia 8600/8700 or an ATi X1300 or similar. That’s a significant step up in power from the laptop I was looking at (which had a C2D T7300, 2GB RAM, nVidia Quadro NVS 140M).
That’s all well and good, but I don’t really do that much gaming anymore, especially since I quit WoW. So wouldn’t that machine be a little bit of overkill? So, I also started pricing out building my own NAS storage server. RAID5 seems like a pretty good way to go: you only get a total capacity of (N-1)S GB (where N is the number of drives and S is the size of each drive), but should any single drive fail, I won’t lose any of my data. My NAS would mostly be used for backing up my desktop /home/ directories, and storing my movies/TV shows/music/etc. I could probably build a 2TB NAS (5×500GB) for about the same price as the above laptop and desktop.
So with this, I leave to work on Spacesystems while pondering what to do with my not-so-hard-earned money.
