How many computers do you have?

[Barbarossa 51]

.

  Edited September 8, 2012 by Barbarossa  

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

That stupid old Dell laptop my wife used was in awful shape before I bought this Acer. She used my old slllllllooooooowwww Toshiba until last summer when both the Dell and Toshiba failed on her (Toshiba BSODed her, and the Dell is just a piece o' crap), so I had to talk her into accepting her new one as an early Christmas gift.

You could always just show up with a new comp and be like, "Uh, happy birthday?" and hope she loves it. Good luck, Barbarossa.

[your_adress_here 11]

I've got a 5 or 6 year old desktop sitting on my window side, which never gets used (except to run Oblivion once a month, which surprisingly it handles pretty decently). I'm also typing on a 3-4 year old Toshiba laptop which is reaaaally starting to show its age. The screen is broken and it's almost falling apart from the rest of the computer.

However, I'm getting a Macbook Pro very very soon . Gonna be using it for music production (Cubase, Ableton).

[hummer0328 6]

I have a 1 year old laptop running Linux (custom install based off the Ubuntu default kernel options using self-compiled kernel 2.6.38-rc6). This is my primary computer.

A 7 year old desktop running Ubuntu Server 10.04 w/ self-compiled kernel (2.6.38-rc5). I use this as a private Minecraft server for me and some buddies of mine.

A 6 year old desktop running Ubuntu Server 10.04 w/ self-compiled kernel (2.6.38-rc6). I use this as a NAS device (Network Area Storage).

A 4 year old router (Linksys DDWRT54gv8 upgraded to 32MB RAM) running dd-wrt v24-sp2 self-compiled using only needed features for optimization & security. A 1 year old Netgear WNDR3700 running dd-wrt v24-sp2, once again, self-compiled using only needed features for optimization & security. The newer Netgear is the primary router directly connected to my cable modem. The older linksys is used as a wireless repeater for my network and connects up to a neighbors (yeah, I have their permission as the Linksys is in their apartment, connected up to their cable modem). This creates a shared network that also shares ISPs (no, it doesn't double my connection speed, regrettably). What it does do is allow us to apply a complex QOS (quality of service) model to allow optimization of simultaneous connections. For example: my computer might have a couple torrents going using the older Linksys router (and its own slower internet connection) leaving my much faster Netgear router for online gaming for our combined 4 xbox 360s, 2 PS3, a WII, and my Minecraft server.

A Motorola SB6120 SURFboard DOCSIS 3.0 eXtreme Cable Modem. This is connected to the faster Netgear router. The Linksys router is connected up to what ever standard cable modem the cable company supplied my friends with.

I have 2 xbox 360s. The first one is a launch day console that stopped working for a bit (at least until I spent the money to replace it). The 2nd one is a 360 slim hooked up to a Kinnect. The old one is in my room connected up to an old Samsung 21" LCD monitor. The slim is in the living room connected to my network via ethernet.

My PS3. Doesn't get used nearly as much as either of my 360's. In the living room with my 360 slim.

My living room TV. It's a 46" Samsung LED UN46B6000. It is connected to my network via ethernet.

An HD cable box/DVR in the living room.

A Blackberry Storm on Verizon. I'm due for an upgrade, but patiently waiting for 4G LTE to arrive in my hometown later this year.

A Cowon D2+. Used in combination with my new Sennheiser IE8s + Fiio E5 headphone amp. What a combo for amazing, sweet sound!!!

As soon as my friends (the neighbors/roommates) get a house when our lease is up, I'll also be adding a 7.1 receiver to the mix. It will be used in combo with a set of already purchased Boston Acoustic front towers + center/rear/sub set. The speakers were originally prices around $2000 total. Every credible review said they were a steal at original price, and sounded comparable to speakers costing 3-4 times as much. I got them for a total of $350. Minus the sub, as I still need to buy that. Sadly, the year the speakers were made (2007) was supposedly the last year Boston Acoustic had such incredible speakers for so cheap (well comparably for speakers). After that they jacked up their price to be more in line with their competitors as far as quality vs cost.

In total there are about 20 computers/devices that connect up to my home network on a daily basis.

Yeah, I've been told I take my computers/home network a little to seriously. But what kind of IT guy would I be if I didn't...

  Edited March 16, 2011 by hummer0328  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Wow! It must take quite a lot of time to maintain all that.

What are your plans vis a vis the upcoming new release of UBUNTU? I glanced over the web page on it, and I am taking a wait and see attitude. I have one reserved partition I use for testing, but it wasn't even in beta the last time I looked about a week ago. I am running the current version of 10.10 64-bit

2.6.35-28-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Tue Mar 1 14:39:03 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Ubuntu 10.10

It is satisfactory, and I am wondering if I will bother with Natty at all. It won't be the first time I've skipped a distribution.

[hummer0328 6]

It doesn't take as much time as you would think. Actually, having dd-wrt (3rd party router firmware using the linux kernel) took my glitchy Linksys router and turned it into something I never have to touch. Same goes for the expensive Netgear router, and my servers. I never have to touch them. Now, my laptop is a different story, as I'm constantly tinkering and toying with things. Not that I ever actually have to, I just can't leave things be, you know how it goes...

IMO, natty would only be worth it to get the new 2.6.38 kernel. However, the stable version of 38 has already been released with patches. (i guess it's about time to upgrade my laptop and servers, the laptop takes 1 hour to compile it, the 5-7 year old servers take much longer... ) I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone hasn't already backported it to maverick. The only real reason I went through the pain of a self compiled kernels on my old servers is because there were no backports of 2.6.38 to 10.04 server at the time. If your not familar with what 2.6.38 offers, its the one with the "200 lines of code" that increases system performance by up to 10x when the system is under heavy stress.

The 2.6.38 kernel is worth the upgrade. It's nothing like the 35 release with 10.10. Even the 38 rc's that I'm running are more stable than the current 10.10 stable. But, it's not necessary to upgrade to natty to do it, so unless your just dying to use Unity, why bother with the likely bugs and stability issues that it will bring. You could just upgrade the kernel yourself using available backports on launchpad or self-compile (recently found a cool program called kernelcheck that lets you select/deselect all kernel options, applies ubuntu defaults, and patches the kernel for ya, all in a easy to use GUI. Wish I had found this a while ago, when I started self-compiling. Although, I guess I learned something in doing it myself.)

As it's an LTS, I'll stick with 10.04 on my servers for a while. They already have the upgraded kernel anyways (the main reason I would ever upgrade a server).

As I said in my previous post, my laptop uses a very custom look-alike of Ubuntu 10.10. But it's not 10.10. Absent from my install (at least just off the top of my head):

-bluetooth support (you think my Sony laptop would have bluetooth, but no)

-nothing mono (that i know of, but mono is hard to get rid off) like gbrainy or tomboy

-no default games

-Visual Assistance, orca, on-screen keyboard,etc

-Firefox

-OpenOffice

-Piviti

-Empathy

-Shotwell

-Totem & gstreamer video codecs not required by flash player

-unused gnome themes

-Remote Desktop

-etc.

Added are things I would rather use:

-Chromium

-LibreOffice

-Nautilus Elementary

-updated X

-updated Alsa

-Openjdk 7.0 (OpenSource vs of the Java 1.7.0-b130 Milestone 12 "Beta" Developer Preview) self-compiled from source x86 and x86_64

-Zeitgeist with updates

-updated transmission

-Synapse

-cairo-dock

-updated Gimp

-compiled from source ffmpeg, x264, mplayer, and smplayer edgers

-aptitude

-htop

-ssh-client

-preload

-intel-microcode

-etc

Many of these I compiled from the latest available (semi-stable) source (like chromium)

I even made my own LiveDVD to reinstall it if I need to (even retains my custom config settings under gconf for stuff like compiz settings). The desktop runs pretty slow from a DVD drive though

Now it's time to start compiling kernel 2.6.38 stable, and get back to work...

edit:

So what do you think of Unity, or replacing X with Wayland. Personally, I think I'll stick with gnome. Why don't they go and rewrite something that is actually a broken mess? How about pulseaudio, just maybe...

  Edited March 17, 2011 by hummer0328  

[Munchiez 74]

Keep the replies comin! I have a nice little radio station pcs and thats all.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You know, retirement has really softened me up. About the only thing I've self-compiled lately is one of the wine versions because it missed a library. I am just not up to slogging through source code and compilations any more. The wine kernel module takes about an hour to compile on this machine (vs. four hours on my old one). It is a staggering set of code.

As for Natty, I think I am going to wait for a while to even consider testing it. Probably not until the release. What you are doing, Hummer0328, it what I used to do when I was in my middle thirties. Another forty years has taken the edge off.

What I want now is a stable, single-user platform that does what I want, and not what some young whipper-snapper thinks is a good idea. Every once in a while, I get a burst of enthusiasm, but a cup of tea helps that to go away.

I realize that the UBUNTU and other decor development is aimed at "me-too"ing Microsoft's junk in a better way, but I am no longer challenged by the marching morons of Redmond, Washington. I've washed my hands of them.

I fill up my days doing other things, like cooking, cleaning, laundry, reading, a little writing, and following forums. I also play a few logic games to keep my remaining little gray cells working on as many cylinders as they have left. Would you believe the rest is taken up fooling around with SC4?

[blade2k5 1,523]

You know, retirement has really softened me up.

Retirement is nice, especially when you can do it before you drop dead. I know I'm enjoying it, though I do work on Saturdays to help a friend out and for something to do when boredom sets in.

[hummer0328 6]

Okay, I might possibly be willing to admit I've taken my laptop a tad to seriously, just maybe...

wait a sec, on second thought I take that back. I had a very good reason for doing everything I did. After all, the very 1st release of my new Linux Distro, Cobuntu 1.0.1 Zeppelin x86_64 brings much to the table (yeah, it was recently decided by our Development Lead, oh yeah thats me, that the naming convention will start at the letter Z, making its way back up the alphabet, kinda like one of those roadside sobriety test , and 1.0.0 worked fine, but had a fundamental flaw in its dual core optimized boot order hindering essential parts of the system from loading, for example apparmour, but nothing important )

My laptop greatest new found capability is that now it has a 30 second boot (on a 5200 RPM HDD), shaving almost 15 seconds off my previous Ubuntu install. It also completely shuts down in only 4 seconds flat, cutting 20% off Ubuntu's time. Removed are unneeded features, for example the standard US QWERTY keyboard. In fact, the only keyboard installed is US Dvorak.

For our next release: Compiz 0.9.4, Brazilian Dvorak support for our portuguese speakers, and Chromium 39.

Gnome 3 was being considered, but was dropped due to concerns it will once again, be delayed, again...

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You know, retirement has really softened me up.

Retirement is nice, especially when you can do it before you drop dead. I know I'm enjoying it, though I do work on Saturdays to help a friend out and for something to do when boredom sets in.

We're both safe. Only the good die young.

[airman15 4,111]

I have two. The First one was an HP m7560n that worked great and never had any problems until the motherboard died.. (and it was the fastest one I had ). Now I'm working with my mom's primitive Dell and to be honest, I hate it because It's slow..

[zahrul3 471]

I have 5 now

HP Omnibook of some sort: My dad bought it on the sunday market when he first came to Australia as a student in 1999. It still runs well now, my aunt uses it now on a Win XP with an SSD.

P4 Desktop: My dad assembled it by scratch. It used an Asus P4PE board with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 and a GeForce FX for a GPU. It was considered high tech in 2002, now its scrapped.

P4 Desktop: My dad assembled it with parts from the old PC and new 2006 parts. It uses an Asus P5W DH board(costs a ton in 2006) with a new gen 3.2GHz Pentium 4. When Core 2 Duo came out, the P4 was replaced. It still works now, though its missing periphals and frequently gets hot.

Dad's Fujitsu: Some fujitsu laptop, don't know about the specs though.

My Vaio C: Fitted with an optional GPU and a 160GB hard drive(high tech for a laptop in 2006). Specs can be found on the Show us your system.. thread

Mother's Fujitsu: Costs 5 times the price of an average netbook, but runs like one. Still, its thinner than most netbooks and importantly, it has a CD drive, but weighs the same as the average netbook.

[adrcol 1]

Being a software engineer, I have 3 computers though it would make no sense to use all three at the same time. I have one desktop built according to the specs i wanted I have two monitors plugged in to it, one for running the program and the other for code tracing. As this might sound absurd for someone, this is really helpful if you are working in the same field. I have a 2010 macbook pro, which is my personal notebook and a HP notebook-tablet i use for work. Having them all three stemmed from the need and not an avenue to spend on what I earn. I even have colleagues who have more than what I have but practically, you are good to go with three.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Being a software engineer, I have 3 computers though it would make no sense to use all three at the same time. I have one desktop built according to the specs i wanted I have two monitors plugged in to it, one for running the program and the other for code tracing. As this might sound absurd for someone, this is really helpful if you are working in the same field. I have a 2010 macbook pro, which is my personal notebook and a HP notebook-tablet i use for work. Having them all three stemmed from the need and not an avenue to spend on what I earn. I even have colleagues who have more than what I have but practically, you are good to go with three.

Surprising that you don't have a server you can plugin them all into for at least synchronization purposes. You could probably add that easily to your test machine.

I have one machine, but with lots of disk. Currently, I can switch between three versions of my O/S. This is recreational, since I am retired, so I don't need a walk around box.

[Sniper296 83]

Just disassembled my old desktop for cleaning and a possible upgrade, does anyone think this seven year old desktop is worth upgrading:

HP D230MT

Intel Pentium 4 2.66 GHz

256 MB DDR 512 MB DDR

PNY NVIDIA GeForce 6200 300MHz 256MB DDR

Maxtor Fireball 3 HDD 40GB 5400RPM IDE

WD2500B EVS (Scorpio) HDD 250GB 5400RPM SATA

Windows XP Pro SP3

Bold = Possible components already owned.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Sniper, why not put it back together and donate it to a worthy cause? Some of those components are getting close to their best before dates.

[airman15 4,111]

Someone is going to help build a computer for me using parts from my old m7560n that still work. I will finally get to play SC4 after 3 long months!

[TheCrybKeeper 300]

My network is run from a Dell desktop with Windows XP, wired to a Server 2000 home build and wireless to 3 Hewlitt Packard laptops(DV9000 and 6000s).

I also have 19 MACs on the shelves and a couple Compaq Pressarios =)

  Edited April 28, 2011 by frndofyaweh  

[jammy 0]

In our household there is my HP Pavilion dm4 which I have had for about a month, to replace my HP G60 which I still do occasionally use though. My dad replaced his Sony Vaio with an Apple Mac and my sister replaced her Acer something or other with a Apple Mac also. My mum has a HP dv9

None of that meant anything to me but I'm bored and avoiding revision to hope it is of interest to you

[Munchiez 74]

I just got an old 13 year old Dell pentium that runs Windows 98. As I looked at the OS it included 98, and I quickly popped the disc into it and installed sc4. It runs nice! A little lag but what do you expect its old! Runs amazingly and I made over 4 cities today.

[RipRap 4,400]

I have 3 computers -- They were all bought brand new this year!

[IDS2 3,346]

Got a couple old 2003-2004ish Dell desktops downstairs, one of those is used for storage and has no monitor/keyboard and the other is still legit but still has XP. Currently using a 2007 Dell inspiron 1525, with 2GB ram (which isn't as much as it used to feel like) and a surprisingly small 60GB hard drive. Also have a Dell studio from 2009 that doesn't have much on it and (breaking the dell monotony) a Sony Vaio I got last year, it's pretty fast and I use it for 3dsMax and Photoshop

[Munchiez 74]

My mac from 2006, the one I am using now is getting older....BUT works well...occasionally it heats up and freezes with that little spinning ball thing that annoys me so much....planning to get a mac book pro soon.

[airman15 4,111]

Times have changed.. I've been working to buy a computer and now I'm eyeballing an HP p7m series or an HP Pavilion Elite.

[rileyskioo 34]

2 desktops 2 laptops

desktop 1 HP pavill

desk 2 DELL ispiron 53os

laptop 1 HP

Laptop 2 Dell Keyboard does not work

[Legosim 14]

I had my trusty Toshiba A-105 laptop, sold it.

Now I have my gaming computer. See:

Also a PS2, X360, and a PS3 if you count that as a PC

4 total for me and 3 PCs for the rest of the family.