Instead of turning in the machine, probably waiting a month or 2 for Fujitsu to hopefully repair it , I decided to put together a new computer for her. It’s basically a combination of the latest technology on the market and, honestly, totally overkill.  On the other hand, she deserves to finally work with a decent computer. Here are the specs:

• Case: Antec P183B
• Power Supply: Corsair HX520
• Motherboard: MSI X58 Pro-E
• Processor: Intel Core i7 920 2.6 GHz
• RAM: 3 x Corsair 2 Gb DDR3
• Storage: 2 TB in Raid 1
• Graphics: Nvidia Geforce  passive 9400GT

I made sure the computer operates silently enough as it’s one of the few things my mother actually cares about, something I totally agree on by the way. My father didn’t want me to replace the existing fans with even more silent ones though, but the current ones are  silent nonetheless.

I never thought it would happen, but the new computer was initally having some small annoyances: random crashes and reboots. Wait, wasn’t that how this story all started in the first place? It turned out that automatic overclocking of the computer is turned on in bios by default. I can’t even imagine why manufacturers would enable such a feature that can cause instability, let alone on a entry-level motherboard. Anyway, after disabling the automatic overclocking, the computer works like a charm.

Unfortunately, the computer is running Windows Vista 64bit. It’s something I will have to live with for now. My mother’s job requires working with Windows-only software and no, I won’t try wine. Wine beats the whole purpose of using linux after all (not that I would want to trash wine, it’s a fine piece of software). I wouldn’t want to convert my mother to linux in the first place, let’s just say linux is not suited for her. On the other hand it is nice to finally work with a computer that can actually run Vista smoothly. My vista dislikes remain though, except for the slowness factor (on this machine that is).

While I’m at it, I couldn’t resist putting in some linux live cds to see how this new computer behaved in the world of linux. A linux install is out of the question. Not only because of the reasons mentioned above, but also because otherwise I probably wouldn’t even hand out this computer to my mother anymore. If you didn’t get it by now, yes I’m jealous.  The 2 live cds I currently have at my disposal are Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty and Arch Linux 2009.01. Both are 32 bit versions. As expected, both ran just fine. No errors and every device detected, as I anticipated. For the ones interested, you can find the dmesg file here. I also didn’t experience any problem with fans ramping up to their maximum as some linux users have reported for the Intel i7 platform (socket 1366).

Now let’s hope this computer will last a little longer than my mother’s previous computer. If it’s any reference, the last computer I have put together and also my main desktop is still running after 5 years of hard work.