It's done...... that which will become known as the Great Rebuild of Winter 2013-14 is finally finished! Here I sit drinking coffee when I should be at work and contemplating my existence, while listening to the sounds of a happy hard drive working to back up a computer. It's the completed "Spectre" backing up the rebuilt "Blackbird". Last night, I finally figured out what was wrong with the HighPoint Caching RAID controller, and got it up and running. Let me just say this about HighPoint: great concepts, good hardware..... terrible instructions and support!
If you are "of a certain age", you'll remember the Japanese models of the 1970s. Superb quality, enough to put AMT, Revell, and Monogram to shame, but they were not for the faint of heart. Not very good instructions to say the least! This is what it's like to work with HighPoint products. You're going to have to figure it out yourself.
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But hey, I could be out there in this instead. I almost forgot; I'm home this fine Monday morning instead of at work, because we had yet another ice storm. Yup, high ground temperature, rapidly plunging temps and precip, makes great ice around these parts. Combine that with the modern inability to drive in inclement weather makes for an extra holiday. Well, not really. We'll have to make the day up later, but that'll be in June, so I worry about that later.
In the meantime, that which rarely happens, has come to pass. All of our "frontline" computers are "up-to-date". My son and daughter are on freshly loaded (within 3 months) machines. The son on his mother's hand-me-down 15.4" widescreen T61 and daughter on a Z61t which replaced the dead X61. Both of them have 64Gb SSDs in them, running Windows 7 SP1 and will be for the foreseeable future since they don't need much storage (especially now that the server is up). AND Windows 8 is the Vista of this age, so no OS upgrade anytime soon.
Can I just say that I'm reveling in the current state of my wife's bliss? You know.....Happy Wife, Happy Life!?! After her recent upgrade to the ThinkPad T500 which is the F35 "Lightning II" on our network, and last week's tablet upgrade from iPad2 to iPad Air.
The whole thing went very well and is an excellent example of Craigslist at work. As soon as I was given a clearly defined edict to get an iPad Air, I had the parameters necessary to do my job. Although, it being an current Apple product, which meant that there wouldn't be any sort of "great deal" to be found, I could maximize my resources. I knew the 32Gb iPad Air (henceforth to be called the IPA), retails for $599 and even the most aggressive discounts would only bring it down to $560. Don't ya just love Apple? Early adopters/buyer's remorse folks, selling on CL typically price the 16Gb for somewhere over $400, usually around $450. However, after reading several reviews, it was apparent that the current prevailing wisdom is to bypass the 16Gb model since the newer apps have all blown-up due to graphics optimized for the Retina display. ....And since this was Momma's vs. a kid device, prudence would dictate buying the higher spec unit. While looking for the "new" unit for her, I went ahead and listed the old generation 1 iPad that the daughter had been using, on CL as well (Cascade works on tablets too) at the $150 that we paid for it. On Thursday, I found a new, still in plastic 32Gb, IPA for $530. When you factor in the $45 or so tax savings, plus the $30 savings from the lowest retail price; it's a rather substantial $75 off of store price and $115 off of "retail". Yeah, I jumped all over it! The following day, the 1G sold at $150 making the cost of upgrade $380!
On my end of things (now that my wife is squared away), the Raptor, otherwise known as ThinkPad X301 is running great! The switch over to the Intel 320 (X18) hasn't just been seamless, it's been an upgrade with a the few glitches that I'd occasionally experience completely gone, and it running very smoothly. The Blackbird, of course you know about due to ealier posts. Plus, both HTPCs (Viking and Hawkeye) also got SSD upgrades and fresh OS reloads.
What brought on this bout of introspection? This. I ran across an ad for 2 HP "Blackbird" 002 cases. This machine came on the market around the time that I built my first version of the Blackbird. It was one of those thing that major manufacturers go through periodically just to show everyone that they didn't just build office machines and junk sold at Wal-Buy. It was pretty amazing, with high-end everything and even water-cooling to boot. Dell did something similar are that time in their XPS line. Of course, neither went anywhere in the market and therefore became "one-offs", but hey, that doesn't mean they weren't cool. I've occasionally thought I'd like to build in one of these cases, but at the $300 that the guy was wanting, it only reinforced that the frugal-way is the best way for me. As I sit here with my file server doing it's first full backup on the workstation; both machines together don't break the $1000 barrier!
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