“He's not a very nice pig... But he's a BIG PIG!” — Roger Waters, Pink Floyd bassist/writer/psychopath/singer at a live show in the late 1970s.

I'm not sure why I included that quote above. It's just the first thing that came to mind as I sat down to write this.

Speeding things up

My dad uses two computers. He has one at home and one at his office at work. He uses both computers for generally the same things:

• Reading e-mail
• Browsing the Web
• Word processing
• Playing Freecell

His computer at home runs Microsoft Windows 98SE. His computer at work runs Red Hat Linux 7.3.

I'd love to get him to the point where he runs Linux on both computers. I'll need to find Linux versions of some genealogy software before that can happen, though.

In any case, my “experiment” of putting Linux on his computer at work has shown itself to be a success. He is able to do everything he needs to do and can do so with fewer frustrations. Before I installed Linux, he ran Windows at work. Because his work computer was cobbled together using old hardware (I think it was a Pentium 150 with 32MB of RAM), he had to be very patient with it and it crashed a lot. I was able to upgrade him - just slightly - to a 300Mhz AMD K6-2 w/ 128MB of RAM. I knew he wouldn't notice the benefit of better hardware with Windows, so I put Linux on there. He was hesitant at first, but after I told him he had no choice he accepted it and hasn't complained since.

I think he enjoyed having to learn something new even though I configured KDE to make it as easy to use as possible.

For Christmas, I upgraded the CPU in his home computer from a 750Mhz AMD Duron to a 1200Mhz Duron. Unfortunately, the performance boost was marginal. As I listened to his hard drive clicking away loudly, I remembered the hard drive was relatively ancient. It had stayed with my dad through at least two major upgrades. That clicking sound was worrying me. It sounded like bearings going bad and I was sure a new hard drive would be at least three times faster. At least!

I picked up a 40GB IBM Deskstar (7200 RPM) to replace that 4.3GB Western Digital drive in my dad's computer. Tonight, I installed it. Of course, my dad's probably going to die of old age before he uses 40GB (Of course, I thought that would happen to me when I got a 730MB hard drive in 1994). He and I were both blown away by how much faster everything ran with the new hard drive. And it's also much quieter.

I partitioned his computer to run Linux and Windows. This will make it easier for me to migrate him to Linux when I find (or write) some decent genealogy software.

Worky worky

I had a great time at work today. Enough said.