Wish it was always this easy (PC woes)

[mapsedge]

I was right: it was a hardware problem, specifically the video card.  I've never seen a capacitor "pop" before: there are seven on the card, the size of pencil erasers, and five of them blew their tops out.  Wow, guess that's a problem.

I have ordered a new card.  It ought to be here by Thursday: this one has a fan on-board, so as long as the power supply on my IBM can handle it (and I've no reason to think it can't) I should be back in business.

On to work.

Comments

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

I've started dreaming about a new PC for home that I can use for video production: multi-core processor, multiple monitors (hey, why stop at two?), top out the memory, large SATA hard drives, etc etc etc. Biggest problem for video production is storage...a four or six terabyte DriveZilla would be reeeeeeeeeal nice.

[jehosefatz.livejournal.com]

One of my direct reports has been raving about Ubuntu Studio for a couple weeks -- he's doing animation/Blender related stuff but a lot of what you're describing is similar.

Normally I'd recommend WD 15K Raptors, but if you need size over speed there's no point.

- Jeho

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

I had no idea about Ubuntu Studio. I recently installed Ubuntu (vanilla distro) on my sandbox pc and really like it: it mounted NTFS, shared (with Samba) no problem. My favorite editor (Notepad++) supposedly runs in Wine (though I haven't tried it yet). That there is an edition that includes all the other (and looks really nice, too!), I'll just have to try it.