On Computers I Don't Know What to Do With
[ rakaur on Mon Apr 03 at 01:02 AM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]
So, I have too many computers.
Right now I’m writing from my desktop, daedalus, which I pretty much haven’t touched since I got my MBP, praxis. I’ve been trying to reason out where I should go from here. There’s several possibilities.
I could ditch Gentoo, and put Windows on daedalus, and use it for gaming or Windows-critical stuff, and just use my laptop for desktopping. The good thing about this is I would have an OS that 95% of shit is designed to work with. The bad thing about this is that 95% of shit is designed to work with Windows. Another thing is, well, do I even need Windows? I’ve been using Gentoo without any access to Windows (excluding the once-a-month trip to my mother’s computer) and not really had major problems, so, I don’t know. Games, yeah, but honestly, what games do I play that need Windows? I mostly play UT and Quake, both of which run on Linux. It’d be nice to be able to play DirectX games like Homeworld 2 and Starcraft again, though. There’s details to be worked out though. If I’m going to be using my laptop for desktop stuff, where am I going to stash the 200+ gigabytes of crap I have? I have a ton of video content (mostly downloaded TV shows that I rewatch a lot) that I don’t have room for on the laptop. It only has an 80G hard drive, and I have more than that in video alone. All of my music is already over there on iTunes, and I sync it back to daedalus to play on real speakers. It’s all in the details, but this is the likely story.
Option two is to replace cyndane, my server, with daedalus, and just plug my laptop into my monitor/etc when I need to use it as a desktop. Kind of a pain in the ass, unless I get some kind of dock (which there doesn’t seem to be for MBPs yet). Might be worth it though. Requires me to disgard one of my computers, which is kind of silly, as it’s perfectly good at what it does. I could even put X on it, but I’d never use it. I have a KVM switching to it now, and I never switch over unless daedalus has died for some reason. Though, another form of this idea takes hold in the next option.
Option three is to sell daedalus. Option three point one is to sell it and put the profit into my loan, and use my laptop as a desktop a la option two. Option three point two is to sell it and save the profit, and slowly save until I can afford an iMac. This would be kind of cool, but it’s not very realisitic, and I can’t honestly do something that irresponsible.
Both option two and three leave me without a gaming system. Well, sort of. My laptop has a card that’s pretty much on par with daedalus (laptop has a radeon x1600, daedalus has a geforce 6600gt), but how many games are seriously ever ported to Mac? A fair amount, but any that I’d want to play? Any that are popular enough to show up on, ahem, alternate distribution methods?
Update: After actually looking, it seems as though I could run Quake, UT2004, and HW2 on OS X. UT2004 is Universal, but I don’t know about the rest. None of them would be playable under Rosetta. Update Update: Turns out UT2004, and all the Quakes are Universal. HW2 is not, and probably never will be since it’s thoroughly dead.
A bad thing about the “plug laptop into desktop stuff” options is that my laptop’s monitor is widescreen, and my desktop’s isn’t. Dual screening would be kind of hard, seeing as how they’re on different playing fields. I could always enable mirroring, which is fine, but I have to switch resolutions from 1440x900 on my laptop to 1280x1024 on my monitor, which is “down” a bit. After using my laptop for days, everything on this computer seems huge and ugly. I’m sure some of it is Linux vs OS X rather than resolution, though.
The big problem with using my laptop for desktopage is, again, storage. I have 260GiB on daedalus. I have 80 on the laptop (for some reason I have issues just calling it anything other than “the laptop” in words, even though its name is praxis), and 40 on cyndane, plus a 40 for a backup drive in cyndane. I could always throw the 200 in cyndane and use NFS or something. That’s kind of crappy though, ‘cause I’d constantly be transferring files over wireless, which sucks. I could try to find the biggest laptop SATA drive I could, and stick that in, but I’d have to reinstall OS X and everything (not that big of a deal, but man, I just got it how I like it). [Update: Turns out that’d be a 160G, and it’s $300, so that’s a no.]
If anyone actually bothers reading anything I write these days, please let me know what you think.
Also, I’ll hopefully be getting around to cleaning my room tomorrow so I’ll try to post new pictures and update the toys stuff.
-- rakaur // 2006.04.03 @ 01:02 AM
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