08:58 – I watched with disgust last night as the authorities captured the second muslim terrorist alive instead of gunning him down as he so richly deserved. I kept thinking how unfortunate it was that the cops used flash-bang grenades instead of fragmentation grenades. Or they could have just done a Bonnie & Clyde on that boat, and put a thousand rounds or so through it.
10:51 – Barbara brought her sister’s failed desktop system home the other day. At first I thought it was a dead power supply, but replacing it did no good. I suspect a dead motherboard, and the system is old enough that it made no sense to replace a bunch of components. Instead, I just picked one of the systems sitting under the table in my office. That turned out to be an old system that we’d built as a project system for (I think) the second edition of the Perfect PC book. The system is old, but it has almost zero time on it. When I fired it up, it sounded like a leaf blower. Barbara said it didn’t sound all that loud to her, and Frances said they didn’t care because the system sits in a spare bedroom where it wouldn’t bother anyone. So I went ahead and installed Linux Mint 13 LTS on it, which gives me four years of not having to worry about updating the OS. Frances and her husband are stopping over sometime today so we can get their email, Skype, and so on set up. Right now, it’s in Barbara’s office, connected to her peripherals and Ethernet cable.
As long as I have Barbara’s system disconnected, I’m going to go ahead and swap it out for her new system. The old one is a hex-core processor with lots of memory, and was originally intended to replace my main system. Barbara’s old system failed, and the hex-core system was just sitting there, so she’s been using it for the last year or more. It’s much more system than she needs, so I built an Intel Atom system for her to replace it. The hex-core then moves to my office to replace the antique Core2 Quad 9650 that’s currently my main system. Barbara uses little more than email and browser on her office system, so a quad-core Atom is more than sufficient.
I’ve already done several backups of her hard drive, so once I pull the hex-core system from her office, I’ll put her current hard drive on the shelf, replace it with a 3 TB drive, and install Linux Mint 13 LTS on my new main system.