Lies, Damn Lies, And Motherboards

I wanted to order my new PC today, because I urgently need to rebuild both my Windows and Linux boxes.* But that nice new Nvidia-based motherboard (below) isn't in stores yet, so I was going to go with a similar Intel G45 motherboard - until I noticed, just before sending the order, that the PCI-e x16 slot was really only a x4, just as it was in the previous version, based on the old Intel G33.

Well, crap.

So I went AMD instead. The 9750 will likely be a bit slower than the Q8200 would have been, but I'm still moving from a 2.6GHz dual-core to a 2.4GHz quad-core. And it means that I can swap parts between boxes.  And I was kind of thinking of upgrading my Vista box to something like this anyway, and now I kind of have.

Other than that, a 1.5TB C: drive, 3 DVD burners (so I don't have to swap disks to switch games) and 8GB of RAM. Case is a Lian-Li V600, power supply a Corsair VX-450, both the same as my current machines.

Once I have this, I can load Vista and all my software on it, then copy everything off my current Vista box and install Centos 5.2 and OpenVZ, and then copy everything off my old Linux box onto the new Linux box and then install Centos 5.2 and OpenVZ on that.

Or maybe Fedora 10 and Xen.

Won't that be nice?

* My Windows registry has got corrupted - probably due to the bad RAM I had earlier - and this is causing all sorts of horrible problems. Not least of these is that I've lost all my shell extensions, including Tortoise SVN, which I need for work. It's also somehow killed the Windows Installer service, conveniently preventing me from ever reinstalling Tortoise SVN.

Meanwhile in Linux land, I need to compile a current version of Pixman so I can compile a current version of Cairo so that I can start doing some work with CairoPlot and Matplotlib for Minx. Only problem is that things won't compile, apparently due to some conflict with the pre-installed (but out-of-date) version of either Pixman or Cairo. And I'd just remove those, only Cairo is used by GTK, which is the heart of the entire Gnome desktop environment, so deleting Cairo would delete about half the operating system.

All I want is one (1) working Vista box and infinity (∞) working Linux boxes. Since I'm unlikely to get the latter, I'll settle for the ability to easily create new virtual machines at will. Hence the OpenVZ and/or Xen.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:29 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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