Saturday, January 03

Geek

Kei

So, my New Year's Resolution was to set up Kei, my shiny new Windows PC that has been waiting to be assembled and installed for...  More than two years.

And done.  Not perfect, but done.*  Finished about 3AM today.  

Since I had a lot of parts to play with, even though many are two years old, the result is pretty good: 8-core 3.6GHz CPU, Radeon 7950, 32GB RAM, 2 x 960GB SSDs, 5 x 2TB disks, and a Blu-Ray burner for burning all my Blu-Rays.  22 USB ports (8 x USB 3 and 14 x USB 2), and 12 x 1/8" audio ports for that perfect 16.2 mix.

Currently Kei is hooked up to a spare 1600x1200 monitor and I'm sharing the keyboard and mouse via Synergy, which works perfectly except that the Windows Do you want to allow this program to do stuff? dialog flicks me to the primary monitor on Nagi every time.  (Update: The solution for this is the obvious one - plug the keyboard into Kei and share in the opposite direction.  Works great now.)

Now I have a bit of an install party going on.  I built Nagi late in 2008 when the original Kei went flaky due to faulty memory.  So Nagi has everything installed.  Despite a few hiccups over the years, that adds up to 841 applications.

I'm hoping to whittle that down a bit.  Really, I just need my JetBrains IDEs, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, Visual Studio, Sony's creative software, Notepad++, Cygwin, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, Firefox DE, iTunes, Clementine, Steam, Origin, Xshell, Xftp, Zoom Player, Python and Ruby and about a hundred libraries for each, uTorrent, Bryce, Carrara, Hexagon, Poser, virtual machines running CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 14.04...  

Hmm.  This might take a while.

The other thing I need to do is decide on a new monitor; my Dell U2711 is visibly declining.  Right now, my short list is either the Philips 40" 3840x2160 monitor or a couple of Dell's new U2515H 2560x1440 screens.  The Dell is about half the price of the Philips and has about half the pixel count, so it all balances out.  The only real problem with the Philips monitor is that it has a static television-type stand, where the Dell is height adjustable and rotates on all three axes.  Well, that and 40" is huge.

* As usual, the disk layout isn't what I wanted.  Windows 8.1 denies the existence of my motherboard's RAID functions, and it also denies the existence of either my Adaptec RAID card or my cheap dual-port SATA card, so after much messing around I'm left with RAID-0 for the local drives and one drive not doing anything at all.  Plus the SSDs aren't on the first two SATA ports, so it seems that Windows put a boot partition on one of the disk drives, so if that ever dies Kei won't boot any more.

But those minor issues aside, the dual SSDs, eight cores, and 32GB of RAM really makes a difference.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:56 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 I don't think I have 22 USB devices, let alone need 22 ports for them! 

Great googly moogly, Pixy's created Skynet.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, January 04 2015 04:04 PM (jGQR+)

2 I'm pretty sure I have 22 USB devices if I gather everything together.  But this is a slightly older motherboard, so it has lots of USB 2 but only a couple of USB 3 ports (14 and 2 respectively).  I added a 2-port USB 3 card, then I found a cheap 4-port USB 3 card and added that as well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 04 2015 04:44 PM (PiXy!)

3 And I've installed 399 programs so far, so I'm on track to exceed Nagi's count later this week...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 04 2015 04:45 PM (PiXy!)

4 Can you uninstall the "French Spam" attraction plugin for The Pond?  :-(

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, January 07 2015 05:37 AM (jGQR+)

5 Ooh, now I'm getting NFL football spam, too!

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, January 07 2015 01:11 PM (jGQR+)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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