Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Home Desktop Upgrade

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Last week I decided to sink some money into my slowing aging desktop computer. I upgraded my 9 year old 19″ Dell CRT to a 22″ Samsung 226BW Widescreen LCD and my eVGA 6800GS to an eVGA 8800 GTS 320MB.

I have to say I’m pleased with both components. The widescreen display is really nice when working with multiple applications and windows and the 8800GTS just about lays waste to any game that I might have (Battlefield 2142, Company of Heroes, GRAW2, Armed Assault, Half-Life 2, etc).

Here are the specs today;

  • Antec P180 Case
  • Antec Neo HE 550 Power Supply
  • EPOX Nforce4 Ultra+ Motherboard
  • AMD 64 X2 4200+ (939 Socket)
  • 2.0 GB RAM
  • (1) 250GB Seagate
  • (1) 350GB Western Digital
  • Sony CD-ROM/DVD-ROM Drive (DDU1615)
  • Sony CD-RW/DVD-RW Drive (DRU-810A)
  • eVGA 8800 GTS 320MB Superclocked
  • 22″ Samsung 226BW Widescreen LCD
  • Nvidia nForce Onboard Audio
  • Plantronics SmartCon Headset
  • Logitech G5 Laser Mouse
  • Windows XP SP2

I’m currently waiting for the new version of the Logitech G15 keyboard to be released.

The original version of the G15 seems just too big and large for me and my desk. I’m currently using an old 102-key Dell keyboard that came with me Dell 8200 almost9 years ago.

The upgrade and installation were fairly easy. The 8800GTS cards really take up some space so you need to be careful of the clearance within your computer case. They are about 9 inches long and occupy two slots sometimes making it impossible to run them in an SLI configuration. Although I understand the the 8800GTX is almost two-three inches longer than the 8800GTS.

Cheers!

It’s yet another blog…

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It’s yet another blog… yes it is and will probably never go anywhere but I’ll give it the old college try and see where it goes.

I literally grew up with the birth of the Internet and while I’ve generally embraced technology I’ve never really had time for the great social craze that has spread across the Internet, Blogging. While I probably still don’t have the time I would like to share some of my thoughts, ideas, code and solutions for some of the technical problems that I encounter day in and day out in my real life job as the network architect for a large health care provider.

While I’m on the journey I’m also curious about all the great tools that the Internet offers. The Internet has certainly come a long way from it’s early heydays with NCSA Mosaic. I can still remember messing with the IPX/SPX/ODI stack in MS-DOS trying to get the proper packet driver to load so that WinSock.DLL would function in Windows v3.1 and programs like NCSA Mosaic and Pegasus Mail would function properly. I’m sure there are those of us still around that can remember messing with HIMEM.SYS for hours until we were able to fit everything into memory when it came to Novell’s ODI stack.

I’m also setting up a website that is designed to host some of the scripts and tools I’ve written and developed to help make managing a large network easier. I’m a staunch advocate of making the computer do the work. To that end I personally employ Perl, PHP, SNMP and Bash scripts. I do the majority of my development work on CentOS Linux. If your looking for a solid, reliable Linux distribution then you should definitely check out CentOS.

Lately I’ve begun to explore the world of DHTML and how I can re-write some of my traditional console based scripts and applications into web applications. I’m quite familiar with static HTML and somewhat familiar with CSS but I’m clueless with respect to DHTML and JavaScript. I’ve also finally starting using MySQL as a way to store my data sets (I know I’m probably the last person in the world to stop using flat text files).

If your interested browse over; http://mysite.verizon.net/michaelfmcnamara/

Cheers!

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