molly.com
Wednesday 18 January 2006
Okay Computer: A look at our computers and how we use them
I’M SITTING HERE LOOKING AT THREE COMPUTERS and thinking about the computers we have and how we use them. With web designers and developers, the results are sure to be very vast and varied due to all the platforms we deal with regularly.
Here’s my stuff:
- PowerBook G4 (12″) running OS X 10.3.9 – main travel computer, so for me, my day-to-day computer. I love it for the majority of tasks but doing any kind of screen intensive work is very difficult with the 12″.
- Home-brewed Intel Pentium 1 Gig RAM running win2k – main office server, runs my network as well as serving as the primary storage for 32 Gig of music and thousands of photos (oh boy I need to back this one up).
- Sony Intel Pentium notebook running winXP – had a great display which is why I used it but the screen is dying and I really only use it for testing.
- There are about five other computers in various stages of use or disuse in my office here, including an original blueberry iMac (yum!)
- Remote Web servers – I work on a variety of them, mostly all Linux of some sort with Perl, PHP, MySQL and a variety of open-source software related to web sites. I don’t work on any Microsoft servers currently.
What computers do you have and how do you use them?
Filed under: hardware, software, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 05:56 | Comments (53)
Main computer: Homebrew Athlon 1600+ running WinXP and Mandrake Linux (gotta upgrade that). It’s may be three years old, but it still meets my needs… I just doubled the it’s RAM last month (up to a GB). 19″ and 17″ CRT monitors.
Experimental: A Dell Dimension 4100 a neighbor of mine threw out, it was clogged with spyware so I formatted the drive and now it runs like new. When I’m not testing hardware or doing some dangerous experiment with the operating system (“WARNING: May corrupt your partition”… HA!), I’m using this second PC to convert MPEG files. This has run Win95/98/98SE/XP/Longhorn Alpha, whatever I have lying around to test my software on.
Laptop: A big help when I moved last year but couldn’t haul the desktops down right away. Dell Latitude C600 running Win2K.
Alarm Clock: An old Pentium I running Win98. Hooked up to a timer and set to run Wake Up! Pro in the morning.
I have a g4 15″ imac in my daughters bedroom. A g4 ibook that my son is using. A g3 ibook that I use to stream music to my bedroom (the only Mac I’ve had from new). A 1.8 core duo mac mini as a media server in the living room.
A beige G3 with a powerlogix 600mhz G4 upgrade that I use as a webserver. A blue & whie G3 powermac that is my mail server.A 2.3Ghz dual G5 that renders my sons media projects. A mirrored door 1.25 G4 powermac that runs 3 20″ monitors that I do everything else on.
I also have a 1.9Ghz pentium 4 running Linux mint and Kubuntu and about 10 other Macs of varying vintages that I turn on from time to time to see if they still work…Macs just wont die! I also have one big fat carbon footprint……do I work in I.T.? No I’m a plumber….