[Today’s run: 5.5 miles]
I had been thinking that I needed to get at least one more computer around here, something I could use to evaluate radio station programming software.
So today I found a place here in town that was selling some stuff on ebay and I bought a dell desktop box in the compact case (Dell OptiPlex 755 c. 2008) . It will replace my current dell tower (Dell OptiPlex 380 c. 2009) and I’ll use the tower for the radio stuff. It is slightly slower than the tower, but not enough to really matter.
I moved my Windows-XP hard drive from the old dell to the new dell and now I am trying to get all of the drivers downloaded and installed. Until then my screen is kind of goofy and things may or may not work.
I should have this thing going ok by noon tomorrow.
(later)
I put the old hard drive in the new computer, swapping out for an empty 80Gb drive which isn’t enough room to do what I want. It is always interesting to see how they mount the drives in these things.
I was able to boot up in Windows right away but the screen was the wrong resolution and the mouse and keyboard didn’t work. Fiddling with the USB ports I stumbled into a situation where the mouse and keyboard worked.
In these situations it is really helpful to have another computer where you can access the support website to download drivers and such. My hard drive had Windows-XP on it, but it was configured to use a certain collection of hardware. And the new box has different hardware in it. I used another computer to go to the Dell website and download the three possible network card drivers. I transferred all three over on a thumb drive. Pretty soon I had the network going.
Then I used a browser on the new box to go directly to the Dell website. I worked down the list of drivers and added stuff. I could watch the device manager recognize more items as I went along. Eventually all of the devices were accounted for.
On my old configuration I had two monitors. Now I just have one because there is only one place to plug in. I have ordered a half-height video card with dual DVI capability, that was about $20. When that comes I will be back to dual monitors. Dual monitors is really nice. You can park some applications in one and do other stuff in the other. It is a “feature” of the windows look-and-feel that you can’t have the “active” window be anywhere but on the top of the pile. So it is really nice to have expansive desktop real estate, if you can get it.
I had to do some screen resolution work. Got my one monitor fixed up to it’s ‘native’ resolution and it looks ok.
My desktop icons are all jumbled around in the default grid arrangement. I will have to sort through that.
But I have the for-work programs all working and things look OK for now.
In the old box I had one drive for Windows-XP and a second drive for Linux and for windows backup space. I really don’t want to wipe out that backup space, and I need to have that Linux partition in certain situations for work and for my own goings-on. The new box only has room for one drive. So I am thinking that I may buy one of these external USB/SATA enclosures and put the Linux/WindowBackup disk in that. Then I will need to buy a new hard drive to put in the radio station computer. I have not yet solidified my decision on this, but I’m moving that direction. It is _possible_ to avoid having to buy more stuff by using the current Windows-XP disk as dual boot and trashing the windowsBackup information on the other disk. I’m trending toward the first option.
Later I’ll spend again to put a better sound card in the radio station box. To get the one I want (M-Audio Delta 44), I need a full size PCI slot. The compact desktop case won’t do that. No problem.
The last time I did any substantial PC sound card research was probably about 2005. At that time the M-Audio Delta 44 was a good solution. Since then it looks like the market has shifted to USB audio interfaces. I think the Delta 44 may still be a better solution for use under Linux and that is where I’m headed. But I need to do some more research on the issue.