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@dkeg: snowing outside over there? nice. btw, like your table too :)
@gekko :D

thanks rho, the table is made out of barn wood. And yes, we have had 3 snow events in the last week. Here's a pic I took the other day.

Awesome snow, Drew, and I also noticed the fine rustic table right off. Barn wood, sweet.

Thanks man, and its snowing again :). the weather here has been so cold and snowy.

And they say this weekend will be close to 60. Crazy. Tbh, if its gonna be cold, be cold, I can't stand the back and forth, one or the other ma'am.

Thanks everyone! That is an awesome table dkeg.

More laptops than I expected. I had a Pentium M laptop, but I got rid of it because the keyboard drove me crazy.

A little more about my latest project; this is "gadget" -- a 1.6 GHz dual-core Atom board. Basically a notebook on a board (that's a laptop drive, and a USB connector in front, so you can kind of see how small it is -- it's a mini-ITX board).



Being an off-the-scale introvert, I don't like noise, and even my Athlon machine was louder than I liked to have running all the time, so I set out to build a silent machine. gadget has a picopsu fanless power supply and a 12-volt fan running on the 5-volt rail so it's practically silent. The laptop hard drive makes a little noise, so I'd like to replace it with an SSD. The whole thing uses 18W running, and I can suspend it from the command line and resume with the power switch. Suspended it only uses 0.5W.

It works well, and does everything I need for daily use: web browsing, checking email, writing scripts and NFS serving my other machines. I won't be building any kernels or anything else on it. It's running a sid netinstall that uses 1.2G on the hard drive, and I plan to try to keep it under 1.5G. My challenge is to see if I can continue to use it as my "main" machine; kind of a minimalist machine trial.

Honestly, my personal taste in laptops is due to the fact that I take my "work" with me a great deal. I'm doing good to get a couple of hours a day at home, and during that time I normally have things that I'd consider a higher priority than playing on the computer (which I have plenty of time for at my job.) I would certainly prefer to use desktops over them for the price/performance reasons, and that they're significantly easier to work at a component level.

"gadget" looks like a really fun project. I've used plexiglass and an old suitcase handle on a similarly "creative" setup (not quite as efficient or quiet, it was a Athlon X2 with an ati 9700, which sounded like a box fan when I turned it on...but I was just making something from spare parts.)

@pid that is a beautiful project. Back in 2007 I only used the HP Pavillion posted before, cause I was too much of a newbie to properly use my Acer Aspire for some good experiment. Then I left home, did travel a lot, and a laptop was needed. But now that I'm (almost) set, that desktop came back to life.

Trivia: gadget is named for the first atomic bomb -- the Plutonium device that was tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. The scientists and engineers called the device "the gadget."



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_% ... ar_test%29

all of my desktop machines are and have been in storage for the past year. HP Workstation, 8GB Ram, sony vaio, and an old compaq win98. i haven't used it in quite some time b/c even before it was in storage. Our house was super old and space on the thrid floor wasn't insulated, so super cold or super hot. So it mainly sat, alone, and I used my lappy as my main machine. In our new house we don't have that extra space for me to have a dedicated office space. We'll set something up at some time, space wise, but most likely not really conducive to having a whole d-top set up. We'll see. I have an old pic somewhere. I'll look around for it.

^Similar story here. Before we moved into this house in 2006, we lived in a much bigger home, and we had a pretty sweet office room, with a big oak desk, and I had a proper tower computer, and tons of spare parts, etc., enough to build a couple more. When we moved, I got rid of everything and got the iMac, and now we have a small, vertical-ish desk that sits in the corner of the dining room, which the family mostly uses, and I mostly use the T61.

Well, pidsley got me really fascinated with his gadget. I got some spare parts (basically: USB connectors, 2GB of RAM and something else). I'll have a look at those mini-ITX boards and those picopsu power suppliers. It might be a very cool way to use these spare parts and get something useful out of them.

^ I have a photo or two like that too, I'll dig 'em up when I get home...

GekkoP wrote:Well, pidsley got me really fascinated with his gadget. I got some spare parts (basically: USB connectors, 2GB of RAM and something else). I'll have a look at those mini-ITX boards and those picopsu power suppliers. It might be a very cool way to use these spare parts and get something useful out of them.

Great! You need another project, right? :)

kexolino, please do post those pictures.

Here is a 30-meter ham radio transceiver I built about 25 years ago; I haven't had it on the air in almost that long.



I should have kept the Xerox 820 CP/M system I built in 1985. 4MHz Z80 processor, 64M memory, composite video, and two 8-inch floppy drives. That was a sweet system -- it played a mean game of chess. Thinking about that system reminds me how much hardware has changed, but how the software all still does basically the same things.

I'd like to actually "build" a computer, rather than just assemble parts, but I don't think I'm ready for this: http://joewing.net/projects/q1/index.shtml

^ I think I can't go any further than assembling parts. I lack the right skills to build something like that from scratch.
But Christmas is coming, so more time at home instead of being here in the office and back to LFS to finally go on with it like I want to. If I'll go with something similar to your gadget though, I have to buy the motherboard first and the money is not on my side at the moment.

^ understood. I got the Atom board on ebay, but the total combination of parts (about $80) still totals more money than most of my other complete systems.

This is a shitty ph camera picture of one of my desktop machines. This is Vivian sitting next to the desk on the floor (actually it's Vivians clone/replacement after the original vivian was donated to a better cause). The desk is made of nz kauri and the chair is made of english oak. The polished floor is matai (another nz native) and the shelving pine.

Viivan is an old hp dc7600 with pentiumD 945, 2G ram, onboard intel graphics, 500Gb spinning disk. Running Bakewell (very, very well) and Vista (very, very poorly)

Turns out that the actual "iron" was cut off, but nevermind, took new (crappy) ones. Nothing new or shiny here :P

Main machine is this:



...an AMD Sempron 140, 2.5 GB DDR2 RAM, an MSI GeForce 9600GT, and a miserable 250 GB hard drive on an ASRock N68-S mobo. All in a really bad Blueberry case. The monitor is a Dell 1704FPVt, and the best part of the whole setup. Right now it's running Arch + Gnome 3 for testing purposes (in other words, do I want to install Gnome on GF's laptop? The answer is a big-ass NO so far). Other things to note are: the Sony MDR-ZX100 headphones, the Sony Ericcson xperia mini pro, the Logitech LS2 speakers, the sexy carpet and this:



It's a ThinkPad R51 with 256 MB mem, 40 GB hard drive, and an Intel Pentium M (1.6 GHz, iirc), and most of all a broken screen. I really want to fix it up, but for now it's impossible to find the parts for it here. Specifically I'm looking for an LCD cable, but so far I only found one, and that was for 15 inch models (this is 14). It could also use at least another 256 MB RAM and a new battery...

^ My Aspire 1304XC could only benefit from a new battery. I added 512MB of RAM (now is 640) and a tp-link usb wireless adapter, but it only runs without battery at the moment. Not much of a laptop, I know.

gurtid wrote:Viivan is an old hp dc7600 with pentiumD 945, 2G ram, onboard intel graphics, 500Gb spinning disk. Running Bakewell (very, very well) and Vista (very, very poorly)

I love the hp dc series machines. They were built primarily for business use so they are solid. They are very different from the consumer-model HP Pavilions.

kexolino wrote: Main machine is this:

It looks like that under my desk too. Well, maybe not quite that bad. :)

@Gekko: If you can find a new battery for cheap, then I'd say go for it, if nothing else, it could be a backup laptop or a portable make-people-go-wtf machine with the framebuffer xD

@pids: yup, it's quite the mess down there, and there are even more cables behind the case!