Comments on: Building your own PC…

By: wynnmc

wynnmc — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:57:34 +0000

Thanks, Defre, I’d never heard of it. Installed and working )

I hope Alan doesn’t mind his blog being [mis]used as a help desk ;o)

By: Defre

Defre — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:27:25 +0000

Hi,
If you want 32 bits flash on 64 bits browser, try nspluginwrapper, works well with latest flash release candidate (see with your distro for installation).

By: The Open Sourcerer » Build your own PC.

The Open Sourcerer » Build your own PC. — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:44:10 +0000

[...] my first post on this last week, all the bits duly arrived on Saturday morning. I was expecting the delivery to [...]

By: wynnmc

wynnmc — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:00:11 +0000

About 64-bit v. 32-bit: if you want Flash you won’t get it on 64-bit, there’s no 64-bit port yet.

You can go sideways however, and run a 32-bit Firefox binary with 32-bit Flash plugin ;o)

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:02:34 +0000

@Jonathan. Thanks, budget and supplier dictated my Mobo choice. The difference is not actually that much cost-wise between your board and mine but my supplier didn’t stock it and the Asrock has slightly better expansion capabilities. My wife has an Asrock board that has lasted fine. 4years so far… And I went for the version with decent capacitors (The “R” in the model number)

RAM – I can add RAM as and when needed, and I can migrate from DDR2 to DDR3 also. I’m happy with 2G for now. Linux is a lot less hungry on RAM than other operating systems I can think of and I’ve managed fine for the last 4 years or so with just 1G, so 2G should be good for now.

I have not decided on 32 or 64bit yet but a good question. My previous experiences with 64bit Ubuntu were not very good ones. The only benefit I can see with 64bit is more address space and some performance improvements on very large number crunching. For most apps and general work, 64bit is actually slower. But I will certainly try it again. I will have a couple of spare partitions to play with.

Thanks again. The bits should arrive tomorrow.

By: Jonathan Marsden

Jonathan Marsden — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:39:38 +0000

Motherboard: I hope that works out for you. I’d tend to pay the extra for a “name brand” on a build I want to last for “a few years”… maybe a Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3L ?

RAM: 4GB would be well worth the extra, IMO, if you run multiple “hungry” apps — I know UK prices are higher than USA, but you might want to check out whether you can stretch the budget to include 2×2GB rather than 2×1GB RAM modules?

OS: You’re moving up to x64 (64bit), right?

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:39:33 +0000

@BobCFC, that’s good to hear thanks. The next size up won the top award in the most recent PSU tests in Custom PC so I thought it was a decent choice – and it was one of the best priced modular units too

By: BobCFC

BobCFC — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:45:44 +0000

I bought the Corsair 520 modular PSU last year when I did my build.

You won’t be disappointed; as soon as you open the box it oozes quality. This was the first time I didn’t get a cheap no-name PSU and I’m glad I choose this one.

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:02:05 +0000

@wynnmc, thanks for the comments.

I have a server in house that acts as a backup/mirror so having two drives is not really that important. But I do have two currently installed in Twoflower; one is faster, a sata2 but smaller 80GB, so I may well migrate one over if I think it useful.

5 disks go down! That’s pretty bad… I think I have only ever had two disk failures that were unrecoverable in my whole computing life!

I rarely dispose of old computers until they get so old you can’t really use them. (I think I still have some 20Mb hard disks somewhere…) They usually find homes with my kids or in the guest room for visitors, or for development servers/testbeds etc.

By: wynnmc

wynnmc — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:15:54 +0000

You might like to consider a second drive – useful for backups and keeping mirrors of important partitions. I have had something like 5 disks go down over the past few years. You will probably set up smartmontools to run regular checks on the disk (or disks) to warn you of impending problems.

If you get rid of Twoflower, you will, of course, wipe the disks first. You can also keep private information – family photos, emails, letters – on one or more encrypted partitions then, if you forget to wipe the disk, it doesn’t matter.