Saturday Duties

Alvis survived her first week of 7th grade. She seems to be fully confident now with the Jr. High stuff.

Her new desk is working out well and she is lovin' her flatscreen monitor and PCLinuxOS system.

I can't say the same thing for our entry-hall. It has become a dumping ground for her school books, jackets, etc. So Lavie and I will be off to Target or Pier1 to find some large baskets/totes to place under our hallway table to collect the items as they come in. We don't really mind her placing her stuff there, it is a handy place, it is just that it seems to, well, sprawl out across the floor and if we can succeed in containing it to neatly under the entry-table, we all will be happy.

I've also finally decided to try to upgrade my Shuttle SK41G system's memory to 1GB. I've been running it at 512MB since I built it and it has been fine--not slow or anything. However, it is very picky on the memory requirements and I've been watching the memory for it get harder and harder to find. So I think I will bite the bullet and get two 512MB sticks. I don't need more than 1GB RAM (nor do I think it can handle more than that). When we build my brother's Shuttle system, we didn't check the certified memory list and what we got (Mushkin?) ended up causing the system to not even post. A quick trip over to MicroCache with the "approved" memory list for his Shuttle model and we were back to building. Dropped the "approved" memory in the system and good boot and rocking and rolling ever since.

Overall I've been really happy with the Shuttle. I love it's small form factor size. It runs quietly. Expansion sucks. I have room for one HDD, one optical drive, and one floppy bay. I have a very slow HP CD-R/RW drive in it. I have a DVD player as well in an external drive case, but that's hooked to it via USB. And I wish the power-supply was just a little beefier. I don't know if I will go this way again on the next system I build. I will probably go with a mini/micro-tower case instead. That will give me a little more internal expansion room and a more "normal" powersupply selection, but will still keep me in the smaller case size range I prefer for a desktop unit. And I just don't trust the current trend to power some of these SFF pc's using a power "brick" like is used on laptops when powering off an electrical plug. I want a full PSU. But for now, the Shuttle is humming along fine and Lavie still isn't ready to put up with me building a new system. So it will just be a memory upgrade...of course, if I'm going to the trouble of opening up the case...maybe I need to consider upgrading the burner unit as well...hmm..

Oh yeah. I decided I like Microsoft's Live Writer blogging tool so much (even though it is still beta) that I actually uninstalled my Performancing extension for Firefox. How about that?

See you in the skies.

--Claus