Hot, Hot, Hot!

Boy, is it hot! Im having a hard time trying to sleep during the afternoons. Even my PC is complaining. Recently my processor's temp has been averaging 58ºC. I've even had to shut my PC down in the middle of stuff because the power supply temp would shoot over 70ºC. But hey, who am I to complain? I've got a stock CPU cooler and the el cheapo PSU came with the case. It was the cheapest option I had.

And about that upgrade, I've decided to hold off until next year. I thought it prudent to just plan for minor upgrades on this machine, like the long-delayed most postponed upgrade I've been meaning to have -- a better CPU cooler. Maybe throw in a new power supply with dual-fans for better cooling. 512MB of RAM would help too. Ultimate upgrade before the end of the year? A 17-inch LCD monitor! Heck, I'll splurge on a 19-inch one if the prices come down low enough!

But before I get carried away, though... I need to turn off my PC. You know.

Hardware

I've been mulling ubout upgrading for a weeks now. It all started before my birthday. The Core Duo Minis just came out, I've been a Mac fan for years now but have given up that dream to follow less costlier solutions to personal computing. The Minis are priced a bit better than the rest of the Macs, but they're still more expensive than most PCs. One of the few reasons I would really like to have a Mac is because it runs software we use at work. Not that I bring work home, but it would really be much less of a hassle if I could run it from home when I need to. Sadly, that little piece of proprietary software will never run in an open source OS like Linux.

Another reason is space. We're moving to a smaller house in two or three months and this hulking tower of mine will be ill-placed anywhere within the confines of our new home. A Mini would be such a relief to use, especially so that you could use it as a media center of sorts. It has a remote for crying out loud -- LOL! The media center angle is another point I could use to convince the wife.

While it would be wonderful to own a Mini, I could get an equally-priced 64-bit SFF PC for the same price. A little bigger in size but it would be more powerful. Especially now that there's an SFF solution for DYIers like the Focus Nemesis available locally. You can really customize your PC with the specs you want. Small cases used to be available only with motherboards from the same manufacturer (Shuttle & Aopen). Now I have a choice. I can put anything I want in it. Maybe match that case with a micro-ATX motherboard like the Gigabyte K8N51GMF-9 and an Athlon 64 3200+ and you've got one good combination. Give it about 1GB of RAM and a 120GB SATA drive, and you've got zippy performance all the way through. I figure that would be the best way to go since it strikes a good balance between cost, performance and upgradability. You won't get all three when you buy Macs.

There are a few reasons though why my sane rational mind is telling me to hold back on that upgrade. One would be EFI. Everything on the PC side is still based on the twenty-something year-old BIOS. Macs already have EFI. The main advantage of EFI is that hardware drivers work outside of the Operating System. Dual-booting machines would have the same drivers whatever the OS, as long as both already support EFI. Another reason is AM2. AMD is finally moving its memory controller off its chip and will finally support DDR2. Before reading this article, I was racking my brain thinking about why there aren't any DDR2 boards coming out for the AMD platform. Well now I know why. Think looooonger long-term upgrade paths, my friend.

All this thinking is making head hurt. Maybe I should just throw caution to the wind and get one of these tiny things.

Hardsell

This is one painful way to get Linux to work in a Mac Mini... http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp

Gotta Luv Da Fox

After I installed Dapper Flight 6, I tried a few Firefox browser addons. Before this, I was actually contemplating switching over to Opera. It was faster and lighter on RAM, but that was it. The choice of browser still relies heavily on the user experience. It almost always comes down to that. That being said, I still prefer Firefox. Especially after I tried a few of the plugins, a couple of extensions and themes.

For the extensions I downloaded FasterFox and FlashGot. FasterFox tweaks your default settings and basically makes the Fox faster, sans the cheezy icon. FlashGot is basically a bridge between your choice of download accelerator and Firefox. It worked pretty well with GWGET and will work with cURL, Downloader 4 X and KDE KGet, though I didn't not try them all just yet. I will eventually. Dave actually favors Downloader 4 X. Linux is all about choices :-)

I also added themes onto Firefox and was happy that they worked on Ubuntu (of course!). These are some of my favorites: iFox, Metal Lion, iPox, Breeze, and ColorGnome. Gnome addicts will love the Gnome-fx series most of all.

I'll be sticking to Firefox for a while for all of these little addons. And mostly because I was a fan of its grandaddy Netscape. Or is it father??? Oh well, maybe one of these days I'll try the Firefox descendant called Flock. Ah, the beauty of Open Source!