Thou Shalt Kinda-Sorta Covet

At work, they gave me a 2.4 GHz Core2 Duo with 2 GB ram, 160 GB hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 7300 LE graphics card, and a pair of 20" LCD Monitors. It has Windows XP Professional, fully updated, of course. It's nice:

At home, I have an older Dell GX260, upgraded the CPU from 1.8 GHz to 2.26 GHz, 1 GB ram, a 200 GB hard drive -dual boot Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, NVIDIA GeForce4 440 graphics card, and one really big and heavy 21" CRT monitor.

To be honest, I can tell only a wee bit of speed difference between the two. Some webpages load a bit quicker, but you have to really pay attention to notice. If I used Flight Simulator or Flight Gear, I'm sure I'd notice a difference. Otherwise, I don't really do much to tax my home system. Adding another gig to it might help with MS Virtual PC, but other than that, I have no need to upgrade.

A couple of weeks ago, a nice HP, 2.8 GHz, 160 GB hard drive came in. I was temped to change over to that one, especially since it could go to 4 GB of faster memory. That would be nice when working with multiple virtual machines. I played with different graphics cards in it, and had visions of sugarplums dancing on my screen.

A few days after f0ndling the HP, installing and testing Windows and Ubuntu Hardy on it, I realized the machine would work much better for the Edubuntu Classroom I'm working on. Especially since it can go to 4 GB of memory -something really important in Linux Terminal Services. I re-wiped the hard drive, and installed Edubuntu Server on it. I'll probably wipe it again and install Edubuntu Hardy on it, when it comes out in a month.

The upgraded Dell GX260 I have works just fine. Better than fine. It's not slow at all, has enough memory for what I need, and is extremely easy to work inside. Even my mammoth of an HP laptop (should be called 'portable desktop') works just fine. I have no need to get a new computer, or even take another donated one.

Maybe the commandment, "Thou shalt not covet...." should have been:
"Thou can covet for a short time, as long as you eventually come to realize you didn't really need or want what you were coveting."

It would be nice to have two big LCD monitors at my home computer, though.