I think I can say I’m pretty much done with the move to the new computer. The old “scalar”, or “tensor” as it should now be called, has been completely gutted now. Gutted and stuffed, kind off. I’ve removed all hard drives, but now I’ve had too many CD drives, so they had to be moved somewhere. Now “tensor” has no hard drives, but three whopping CD drives. At least one of them is even a CD writer, and one of them a DVD reader.
I’ve moved the two SATA hard drives that I’ve had in “tensor” into the new “scalar”, which now has three SATA hard drives and one SATA DVD writer. One PATA hard drive from “tensor” joined the two already in “vector”, so “vector” now also has three hard drives (albeit PATA) and a DVD writer (also PATA). I also took my original IntelliMouse Explorer (version 1) to work and took the mouse I bought for the office, an IntelliMouse Explorer 4.0, back home. Somehow the latest IntelliPoint software wouldn’t let me change the actions for the thumb buttons; they remained at “Back” and “Forward”, something I find pretty useless somehow.
One thing that I may still do is get a mobile rack. Now that I have removed the 2nd optical drive, I have an open 5.25″ slot, and if I put a mobile rack (the Kingwin KF-101-IPF [1] seems to be a good one) in there and get two trays, I could actually use two hard drives: Whichever one I choose to normally hook up to it (probably VECTOR_MEDIA, 160 GB) and the puny 20 GB hard drive that I still have sitting around. And let’s face it: Over time, I’ll have more and more hard drives “sitting around”. The rack and two trays comes out to $41.56 at Directron, and I should still have $27 store credit from Directron’s assembly screw-up [2] that I’d otherwise probably never use.
Now I’m reorganizing files on “vector”. That’s my media and web server. I’ve decided to give it separate drives for the media and the web documents. C:\ (C: is named VECTOR, 120 GB) will essentially remain the same, but C:\WebDocs will be moved to D:\WebDocs (D: is named VECTOR\_MISC, 80 GB). What used to be in D:\Music has now become E:\Music due to the shuffling of drives, so I’m copying that to E:\Music (E: is named VECTOR\_MEDIA, 160 GB). That fits well, since on “scalar”, E: is also my MEDIA partition. VECTOR\_MISC will contain the documents of the web server (yes, I’m running a small web server, but it’s really just an online collection of bookmarks and some documents I may want to access from anywhere), about 4.5 GB, and probably also some Ghost backup images, maybe 25 GB. That leaves over 40 GB for additional web space… What could I fill it with?
Some software is still missing or not working correctly on “scalar”. Somehow, my favorite, old, trusted image browsing software from 1999, ACDSee 3.0, only works for the administrator account. I’m not sure, but this may even be a limitation that’s part of the program; it’s pre-Win2k, after all. ACDSee also crashes when it tries to preview videos, and that’s pretty annoying. Nonetheless, I haven’t really found anything else I like. I also need to install TeX and Ghostscript, both particularly important for my thesis, and perhaps a few games (to make sure writing the thesis won’t be too easy… yeah, right). After that, I’ll make another Ghost image of “scalar”.
Hopefully my MacBook, “manifold”, will be fixed on Monday. Then I can do another round of installing there. I should really look out for a Mac version of Ghost. Maybe it even already works. I lost a couple of data files only, and if the MacBook hard drive is gone, then I lost a small DrJava refactoring in progress, but that’s it. My backup scheme is pretty solid, since all the important data is mirrored across many computers. But installing all the applications and getting the settings just right again, that’s what takes time.
Soon we’ve got to start cooking. Diana and I are joining some friends at a potluck. I’ll bring the camera ;)
