Another boring day, although I am significantly wealthier today than I was yesterday. My mother transferred a big lump of cash (well actually 4%pa daily GIC) to me with very little fuss. I don’t feel wealthier; it’s just a little to abstract for my unimaginative brain. It’s just going to sit there and generate interest, which isn’t so bad.

I’ve already decided my main computer will last me another year. I looked at the dells and the low end desktops use pentium 4s or AMD processors. Pentium 4s are horrible power hogs which is one of the reasons I have stayed using my old 600Mhz coppermine Celeron (really a detuned Pentium III) — the old wiring in the house wouldn’t have handled a P4. The AMD processors are a little better power-wise, provided you get the detuned versions, but unfortunely all the motherboards use NVidea graphics which require a binary driver under linux. Binary drivers don’t make the cut — only the Intel onboard video has proper source support for modern graphics hardware which really reduces your choice of hardware if you want to run linux as a reliable operating system. The only decent choices for linux desktop computers are the Inter Core processors, distant descendants of my old coppermine.

HP has quite a few small desktops with the Core processors. The local retailers I have seen don’t have any hardware that appeals to me. Onboard video is available but in frustrating combinations. Further, I would really like a Core Solo as then I could use a nice deterministic kernel, without all those annoying spinlocks that litter modern operating systems. Dual cores is mostly a waste on a desktop machine. I have enough processor cycles on my old machine for most of my tasks. I would only ever run one compute bound program at a time and it would almost certainly not be multi-threaded, which makes me doubt that a multiprocessor would do me any good at all. Compiles might go faster, but I doubt do enough large compilation jobs for it to be worthwhile. So if my future includes multiprocessors, it is only under sufferance.

So, old computer will have to stretch out its useful life for a bit longer.