by kumarileopard » July 9th, 2011, 2:31 am
I'm a little of everything on the PC side (Don't have a Mac, but I may change that someday).
Computer 1: Lenovo 3000 N200 Notebook (Windows Vista/Ubuntu 11.04)
This is my main computer I've had for about 3+ years. It's stable and built like a tank. It shipped with Vista and as soon as I took it out of the box I installed Ubuntu on it. Had to mitigate issues with the wlan card, sound card, and power management (I won't bore you with the details unless you want me to). But that was when this was brand new and most of the issues have been resolved in one way or another.
Computer 2: Dell Latitude D600 Notebook (Ubuntu 11.04)
This is my latest acquisition. I literally had a guy throw this machine away when I worked at a computer shop so I saved it from the dumpster thinking I'd do something with it someday. About a month and a half ago there was a big Amateur Radio convention in town and it has an outdoor flea market type setup where you can find everything electronic and I do mean everything. Remembering I had this computer sitting around I took it with me and began to buy the missing pieces. It was missing the power adapter, hard drive, hard drive caddy, and hard drive adapter. In about an hour of wandering the flea market I got all the pieces I needed and spent about $70 total.
I had Windows XP on it to begin with but since changed it to Ubuntu after reading the only thing you have to do to it to get everything working is disable the parallel port. This is my backup notebook should anything happen to the Lenovo.
Computer 3: Dell Dimension 3000 Desktop (Freenas 0.7.1)
This is another castoff I put some extra pieces in and made a usable box out of it. It's of the Pentium 4 generation but I slapped a SATA controller card and a 2 TB SATA hard drive in it and runs a BSD derivative called Freenas. It's a Web-based Network Attached Storage OS. I can access it though a web browser and right now it doesn't even have a keyboard, mouse, or monitor hooked up to it. All of my files and my dad's files are backed up to this box.
Computer 4: Custom AMD Athlon Desktop (Windows XP)
This computer at one time was mine, but I've since given it to my dad as his main box. I used it to run a web server a long, long time ago. I was using Slackware at the time and it functioned as my Router/Firewall/Web Server for about 2 years until I dropped dime for a wireless router.
"Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?" - Roy in every episode of "The IT Crowd"