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December 22
Desktop Systems

As I warned everybody I would, I spent October pre-writing blog entries, and November publishing stuff I had written in October. As such, I made movement on some reasonably big changes to my computing environment without necessarily having the opportunity to write about those changes and what I felt they meant, because I spend a fair amount of brain power reflecting on the meaning of my environment changes.

The first thing is, especting I would have used it more than I really did, I re-built nachibes with Windows 7 and joined it to the STENOWEB\ domain. This was after copenhagen started looking like it was going to die. That system has an SLI GeFORCE 8800m GTX configuration, and those cards were part of a widespread, well known, and completely inevitable failure. I also shelved umea after it became slightly unstable while running the Windows 10 Tech Preview. Not being sure if it was the hardware (like, a failing disk) or the software, I put Windows 10 Tech Preview on Eisbrecher, which turned out to be a near unmitigated disaster, with Windows 10 predicting the imminent failure of the disk (an Intel SSD 520) at every possible venture along the way, and with the drivers for the touchpad (so that I can disable it) and the machine's switchable Radeon graphics simply not working after the second build in the tech preview.

Windows 10 has been a mixed bag for me, it seems to bring new life to each system it touches, and in the tech preview phase, this has been quickly followed up by the system becoming increasingly unstable, and with the OS blaming it on the hardware, wherever possible. Of course, part of my problem is the hardware, and I've known for a long time that Eisbrecher, a Sony Vaio laptop, was never going to be useful at its full capability beyond Windows 7, just due to driver issues.

None of this changes the fact that I've really needed and wanted a stationary computer. I had tentatively planned on using copenhagen in this way, because it was so giant and had so much graphical firepower, but I wasn't about to pay $300 for a new seven-year-old GPU for a seven-year-old system.

I hadn't been planning on this strategy originally, but when an Internet friend offered a pair of Sandy Bridge-based business desktops in a fairly good configuration (i5-2400, 16GB of memory) for a really good price, I couldn't say no. I ended up with both of them: one (knarvik) will be used as my main desktop. The other, which I have yet to name, is going to be a test SharePoint 2013 server, or a Hyper-V host for whatever I can fit into its sixteen gigabytes of memory. (I'm expecting a linux VM to replace what nachibes was doing before, and some other infrastructure services, such as my domain controller and DNS server, when I start moving away from SBS on TECT.)

The systems each came with the onboard graphics, which manages to be slightly faster than most of my other systems, but knarvik will eventually need a new graphics card, and one or both of them are going to need some more storage. I have a cadre of old 2TB hard disks shucked from their external enclosures when their bridge boards died, but for knarvik in particular, I would like to get one or more solid state disks to boot from. Depending on what I manage to run in sixteen gigs of ram, faster storage could definitely be in line for the Hyper-V system as well.

My friends with long memories will ask: But Cory, what of Computer Upgrade 4? I like to think of it this way: This lets me delay Computer Upgrade 4 until some new motherboards and the Intel Skylake platform comes out, or save longer for a Haswell-E based system with even more memory and cores. The other thing it lets me do in the short term is start planning for some upgrades to TECT, such as increasing its memory and buying some backup hardware for it.

The other challenge specifically related to knarvik (and really, is a big challenge to anybody who has as many systems hanging out as I do) is how to license software on them. Right now, I am running the Windows 10 Technical Preview on it, to slightly better effect than when I was running it on some of my other systems, but Windows 10 is far enough away that I may buy another Windows 8.1 license or move one of my existing licenses to it. I am going to be putting one of my licenses to Adobe Lightroom on the system, as well as my backup software.

Eventually, the solution will be to own and run fewer systems, or run things other than Windows and Office on each of these systems. (Well, or just to buy more licenses to the software I want to use, but not all of the software is easy for a home user to license in such quantities.) Application software licensing isn't too bad, the core of what I "need" on any given system is really just a way to browse the web and a few other basic tasks. With a big desktop and eventually with some virtual machines coming onboard, I think most of my laptops except for one or two systems that are ready to leave the house will be fairly redundant. I will likely still keep them, but they'll likely be used for testing things while being reformatted frequently, or just sitting in the wings.

Regardless, I am excited to have some new and more powerful desktop systems around, and will eventually get around to running some test server stuff on the second machine, or restoring TECT onto it while I then rebuild TECT as a virtualization host, where my new network infrastructure and testing servers will live. Regardless of the exact strategy, there's plenty of time to figure out exactly what that is and buy the requisite hardware.

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