izcool (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} izcool) wrote,@ 2008-03-27 21:33:00 |
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| Current mood: |  geeky |
| Current music: | Sheryl Crow - Love Is Free |
Seti@Home
The other day, I started to think. I really should start doing something useful.
The only thing that came to mind, which I could accomplish in a short amount of time, was to set up a machine to crunch some Seti@Home numbers and work with some Workunits, so I found the right machine for the right job.
It's a bit of a shit machine, but it's good enough for what I want it to do. It's a machine that I got recently, a HP Pavilion 533W.
I had mentioned on here before that I got friendly with the people at the Internet Cafe place that's over at Gurnee Mills. They had this machine sitting in their front window that was supporting their "PC Repair" neon sign up. I asked them about it, and the guy who was working there (I think it was Nick) said he wasn't sure, and I should come back later on it. So I did (this was some time ago, maybe a month let's say) and I bought it from them for $5.00. It was mostly a stripped down case. They probably sold it to me that cheap just to get rid of it, as they probably didn't know what else to do with it. There was no CD-ROM drive, no hard drive, no floppy drive, no expansion cards, and the power supply was blown in it. All it had was the motherboard, CPU, and memory, and the broken power supply. But I gave it a second life by rebuilding it - putting in a Mini-ATX power supply in it (which is TOO small actually, but I screwed it in there, as I ran out of regular ATX power supplies), refitting a CD-RW drive in it, a 20GB hard drive I had lying about, and a floppy drive. The mounting cage for the hard drive and floppy drive are missing, so I screwed the hard drive into the "Expansion slot" bay (below the CD-ROM drive slot), and have the floppy drive sitting on the bottom of the case, inside, where you would have to open up the case to get access to it.
So it's kinda ghetto - but it's now a working machine. There's a hole in the front from where the floppy drive would be, and a bit of a hole where the power supply goes in the back, because I put one in that's smaller than the space that it was designed for. Which is perfectly okay as it's better for cooling when it's working for Seti@Home.
It's not that bad a machine for $5.00 - I think it's running with a Celeron 2.0GHz CPU, 256MB of RAM, a 20GB hard drive that I put in it, and Windows XP Professional that I installed on it.
I haven't done anything with Seti@Home in a long time, but I think it was about time for me to get back into it, try to do something useful again.
I found out, when I was installing BOINC on it, that it appears that they changed it around a little bit. It automatically goes into an "easy" mode when you install BOINC, where it offers you a choice to go to the "Advanced" mode, if you'd choose. So that's what I did. It's still on it's first work unit so I want to see how it goes with how long it'll take to complete. :)
Seti@Home Machine Details are here if anyone was interested, and the picture of the machine follows below.
Oh, and as for the rest of today -
Earlier in the day, I had to take my mom in for a Doctor's appointment, over in Vernon Hills. So, since it was going to take a few hours, I stopped into Westfield Hawthorn Mall and did a little shopping. Mostly looking around without buying anything, but I did buy something. I bought the 2nd Urban Dictionary book from Barnes & Noble.
When I was over at that mall, I found out that a few of the stores that I usually go into over there are closing up or are already gone.
I noticed that they no longer have the Dell kiosk over there, it's completely gone. And I found out that the Sharper Image store that's in that mall is also closing up. A bit strange.
- Mike.
