Hackers Hideout. Computer geeks dream den.

That's the full setup in my home office. You can see the new Dell XPS on the left, the mac in the middle, and the old Dell on the right. You can see the iSight, DinoHUB, and Catbert in the picture. And about 7 years of Lotus/IBM swag from conferences. And the rat nest of cables :)

Home Computer Setup Upgraded

So here is the new computer setup I have at home. The computers are as follows:

* headj-dellXPS - the new computer for gaming and development

* headj-dim8100 - the old desktop which is now used for scanning, a Domino server, and storage

* John Head's Powerbook - my mac G4 laptop, which is my lifestyle computer (email, IM, surfing, document generation)

* headj-toshiba1 - a PSC laptop that is used for client development

* headj-compaq1- a old Compaq laptop used for surfing by others in the house

The new Dell XPS is what gets used the most at home, and here is the specs:

* Pentium 4 Processor 550 @ 3.4 GHz with HyperThreading and 1 Meg Cache

* 2 Gigs DDR2 SDRAM @ 533 MHz

* The XPS Case, which has a dedicated Power Supply chamber with 2 fans at the bottom, a processor fan, a video card fan, and a chassis fan and 8 USB2, 1 Gig Networking, and firewire (6 pin powered)

* 256MB PCI Express x 16 ATI Radeon X800 XT - PCI Express is the new bus to replace AGP, and this is considered the best of the video cards for PCI Express today

* 20 inch Widescreen Digital Flat Panel that swivels for landscape and portrait display

* 2 256GB hard drives in Serial ATA Raid 0 for a total of 500 GB (472 GB in reality) of disk

* 16X DVD-ROM

* 12X DVD+RW dual layer

* Sound Blaster Audigy 2 THX Certified Sound Card

* Dell 5.1 Surround Speakers with Flat Panel mounted center channel

* 3.5 Floppy

It came with a Dell keyboard and mouse, but I added the following to the new setup:

* ZBoard keyboard

* ZBoard limited edition Doom3 keyset

* Logitech MX510 mouse

* APC Back-UPS LS 500

* Belkin 7 port USB2 Hub

Not a bad new gaming rig if I say so myself :) Seriously, this machine is AMAZING. Some stats that are interesting:

* Doom3, UT2004, and Far Cry all play at the highest settings at 1600 x 1280 resolution without a glitch. Yummy

* Websphere Studio Application Developer loads in under 10 seconds.

* Visual Studio.Net 2003 loads in about 5 seconds

* I burned a DVD of images (about 2 gigs) in about 90 seconds

I have some interesting ideas on Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, but will share that in another entry. Here (Provided above)are some pictures:

-jhead