The end of an era: Vista on a dev box, and wintermute's retirement
This weekend marked the end of a long era, and the beginning of another, presumably shorter one.
First, I finally decommissioned wintermute, the old Sony VAIO PCV-90 that’s been running OpenBSD and serving as my home network’s firewall for the last five years or so. wintermute has been in more-or-less continuous operation since I bought it, the first PC I owned, from CompUSA in Rockville, MD back in 1996. wintermute served me well for many years, including occasional car trips to visit my first geek crush for Linux hacking sessions and twinkies. After I moved on to greener pastures (boromir, I think), wintermute was handed down to my siblings, who used it until I took it back for use as my firewall.
It’s quite remarkable that it has the original mobo, RAM, processor, power supply, and network card. The hard drive was long ago replaced, and the CD-ROM stopped working somewhere around 2000, but the machine itself has been solid. Now it’ll go out to pasture in my server closet.
I didn’t want to be rid of wintermute, but my FiOS connection is just too fast for it to keep up with. During heavy torrenting CPU usage was around 60% interrupt, and its 64MB of RAM weren’t enough to handle thousands of NAT state table entries and run DHCP and DNS for my network. boromir has now filled the role, with a screaming Pentium II 300MHz processor and 160MB of RAM, which is likely to suffice for quite some time.
On another, more pathetic note, I repaved wyoh, my primary laptop, to run Vista Ultimate x64. I held out as long as I could, but Windows XP x64 edition’s crap hardware support and non-existent game support made it harder and harder to live with. As much as I’d like to sell all my earthly possessions and switch to Ubuntu, the people that pay me like me to develop Microsoft software, which is something of a PITA on Ubuntu, and before you suggest I do my development inside a VM, fuck yourself and go try it for a day before you get all high and mighty.
I already hate Vista’s huge performance penalty, and the Aero eye candy doesn’t make up for it. I look forward to inexplicable lags and sputters as all the various anti-piracy tilt bits wobble about, lest I use my computer how I see fit to use it, without regard for the wishes of my betters. Hopefully, in the future, Microsoft will dissipate into irrelevance and I can get paid to run Linux like all the cool kids, but until then, you run what you brung.
Tags: Migrated from Drupal, tech diary, vista, wintermute