[Today’s run: 5.5 miles]<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 c. 2008) .\u00a0 It will replace my current dell tower (Dell OptiPlex 380 c. 2009) and I’ll use the tower for the radio stuff.\u00a0 It is slightly slower than the tower, but not enough to really matter.<\/p>\n
I moved my Windows-XP hard drive from the old dell to the new dell and now I am trying to get all\u00a0 of the drivers downloaded and installed.\u00a0 Until then my screen is kind of goofy and things may or may not work.<\/p>\n
I should have this thing going ok by noon tomorrow.<\/p>\n
(later)<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 It is always interesting to see how they mount the drives in these things.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Fiddling with the USB ports I stumbled into a situation where the mouse and keyboard worked.<\/p>\n
In these situations it is really helpful to have another computer where you can access the support website to download drivers and such.\u00a0 My hard drive had Windows-XP on it, but it was configured to use a certain collection of hardware.\u00a0 And the new box has different hardware in it.\u00a0 I used another computer to go to the Dell website and download the three possible network card drivers.\u00a0 I transferred all three over on a thumb drive.\u00a0 Pretty soon I had the network going.<\/p>\n
Then I used a browser on the new box to go directly to the Dell website.\u00a0 I worked down the list of drivers and added stuff.\u00a0 I could watch the device manager recognize more items as I went along.\u00a0 Eventually all of the devices were accounted for.<\/p>\n
On my old configuration I had two monitors.\u00a0 Now I just have one because there is only one place to plug in.\u00a0 I have ordered a half-height video card with dual DVI capability, that was about $20.\u00a0 When that comes I will be back to dual monitors.\u00a0 Dual monitors is really nice.\u00a0 You can park some applications in one and do other stuff in the other.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So it is really nice to have expansive desktop real estate, if you can get it.<\/p>\n
I had to do some screen resolution work.\u00a0 Got my one monitor fixed up to it’s ‘native’ resolution and it looks ok.<\/p>\n
My desktop icons are all jumbled around in the default grid arrangement.\u00a0 I will have to sort through that.<\/p>\n
But I have the for-work programs all working and things look OK for now.<\/p>\n
In the old box I had one drive for Windows-XP and a second drive for Linux and for windows backup space.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The new box only has room for one drive.\u00a0 So I am thinking that I may buy one of these external USB\/SATA enclosures and put the Linux\/WindowBackup disk in that.\u00a0 Then I will need to buy a new hard drive to put in the radio station computer.\u00a0 I have not yet solidified my decision on this, but I’m moving that direction.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’m trending toward the first option.<\/p>\n
Later I’ll spend again to put a better sound card in the radio station box.\u00a0 To get the one I want (M-Audio Delta 44), I need a full size PCI slot.\u00a0 The compact desktop case won’t do that.\u00a0\u00a0 No problem.<\/p>\n
The last time I did any substantial PC sound card research was probably about 2005.\u00a0 At that time the M-Audio Delta 44 was a good solution.\u00a0 Since then it looks like the market has shifted to USB audio interfaces.\u00a0 I think the Delta 44 may still be a better solution for use under Linux and that is where I’m headed.\u00a0 But I need to do some more research on the issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4073"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4080,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4073\/revisions\/4080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}