The box was recently upgraded from 512Mb to 1.5Gb of RAM, so it is now officially sweet. I.e. it actually COPES with having Firefox, OpenOffice and Foobar open, and now takes less than 30s to start up or shut down. Part of the motivation for upgrading (apart from just getting bored waiting for it to do stuff) was that I’ve decided I’ll probably sell it and get a laptop after exams. I spent around £1000 on the parts when I built it, in about 2003/04, and although the graphics card now seems laughably outdated, the general specs are still not to be sniffed at. It’s also quite light and looks good. A laptop is going to be a lot more use for me in the near future – my computing needs have changed an awful lot since VI form!

Do please get in touch if you might have a use for an ATX tower in black aluminium, with 2.16Ghz Athlon XP 3000+, 1.5Gb RAM, Radeon 9600XT (AGP, DVI- and VGA-out), onboard 5.1 surround sound and dual gigabit ethernet, fast DVD-writer and CD-writer IDE drives, optional digital-terrestrial PCI TV/capture card, 120Gb IDE h/d, SATA/RAID capable, firewire and more USB 2.0 ports than you can shake a stick at, efficient cooling, screwdriver-less upgrading, and front-panel access to USB/firewire/headphone/line-in. Comes with Labtec wireless keyboard and mouse, black, with media/internet buttons and a mouse-recharging station, and a ViewSonic VG712b (black) 17″ TFT DVI-/VGA-in monitor, no dead pixels and durable enough to survive a working tour of Europe unscathed. Available from early June.

(FYI, I’ve been running a heavily bastardised *buntu-based linux installation on my oldish Dell C640 for some time. I’ve messed around with the packaging way too much to call it Ubuntu or Kubuntu – indeed, at various times I’ve tried not just the GNOME and KDE packages, but Xfce as well (Xubuntu), and then settled on Fluxbox with GDM underneath. This was before the concept of Fluxbuntu existed. After spending a lot of time yesterday customising the Fluxbox interface, I succeeded (somehow) in removing all display managers. I then put XDM on, and now Fluxbox comes up, but without functional menus… so I can’t even launch a virtual terminal. Ah well…)

My longer term aim is to actually build a linux install from the ground up – I want Fluxbox, but I probably don’t want a lot of what comes with Fluxbuntu. This might signal my first change from *buntu for some years…

Oh yeah, and to conclude my previous post, Airset is vastly overengineered for my needs, but does sync well to Palm devices, so I’m using that. I plan to set up some complicated iCal sharing at some point between Airset, facebook, Google Calendar/Mail, and other webapps, which could be quite cool.