The past several weeks have been an interesting transition as I move from my previous mishmash of computers to HP Workstations. Unfortunately, as a computer nerd and electrical engineer, I am often my own worst enemy while attempting to make progress.
So far, I’ve managed not to shoot myself in the foot. At least to this point in my coming out. I do several primary sets of tasks when sitting in front of my monitors. I decided a long time ago to set up a computer to handle specific workloads.
For example, one computer is dedicated to writing smut stories, graphics design of required artwork, advertising-related stuff, and jerking off. By configuring a computer to best handle certain activities, I’m assured that all of the tools I need are installed on that computer.
My second computer is configured for word processing, desktop publishing, graphics design, and computer programming. There is some overlap, but generally speaking, a specific machine does certain things.
What I had done previously was to add equipment when I saw the need; therefore, nothing is the same. While the appearance doesn’t affect the computer’s performance, it is nice when all the boxes are identical externally.
Currently, under my desk are five computers. My Lenovo smut computer, home-built programming computer, and three new HP computers. I’m now in the process of moving software licenses from the existing computers to their new home. So hopefully, in a week or so, I’ll be down to my new HP computers.
I have a 4-port KVM switch (keyboard, video, & mouse) box that routes a specific computer to my keyboard, mouse and dual 32-inch monitors. With five computers and a 4-port switch, I have to plug and unplug the fourth input between two computers.
So far, it hasn’t been too difficult as I use the new computers primarily. Then when I discover missing files or programs, I switch over to one of the older computers and copy the files over my network. This week I’m pretty much changed entirely over but still have a lot of backed-up files to transfer. I don’t have an urgent need to finish up beyond having to climb over towers to get out so I can take as long as it takes. Luckily, Foxy is back to playing poker, which has distracted her from yelling at me over the state of my office.
Beyond the hole in my bank account, the transition to workstation-style computers with Xeon server processors and maxed out RAM (both are now at 128 Gb each and the third at 64 Gb) seems to be working out.
You’d be surprised at how much equipment beyond lube it takes to enable readers to abuse themselves. As I restarted using QuarkXPress desktop publishing, I quickly realized that it was as big a memory suck as PhotoShop. I’ve had issues with Quark that appeared memory-related and combined with PhotoShop and CorelDRAW only made things worse. However, the new machines with 12-core processors and large amounts of RAM seem to have solved the problems or reduced them in magnitude.
I’ve had a lot of help and suggestions from Mark, kDaddy, and Lisabet in solving my issues. The wheels of progress grind slowly, but things seem to be getting better. I hope that I’ll have the time to convert another ebook to paperback in a day or two. My thought is not to show my computer any mercy and see if it can pull the load without squawking too much.
Creating a paperback version of a story involves a number of steps and different software packages. In order to get Quark and PhotoShop to play nice with each other, I would have to close one down before running the other. Now at this point, I’ve run Quark, PhotoShop, and Corel open simultaneously without apparent problems. But, the proof will be going through the entire process without a hiccup.
A workstation is designed to handle multiple tasks or programs simultaneously, and I hope that going forward, they will reduce the pain and anguish I’ve previously encountered. At least, I’m hoping to use this as an argument to justify cutting into my wife’s shoe budget for new computers.
Larry Archer's World (LarryArcher.blog) 
Well if you’re using the same keyboard for PC #1 as you do for the others, you might want to consider a waterproof one. 😉
I got one of those last year since my wife has a bad habit of spilling her drink on the desk when she uses our shared PC.
If you rinse a keyboard under water immediately, it might recover, but if you let the sugar dry, you’ll have dead keys.
One other thing. If you have all your PC’s networked together, don’t you have them set up to share so you can pull files, as opposed to going to the other PC and pushing them?
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In the older mechanical keyboards, you could run them through the dishwasher. I have one computer set up to share files from it but on most, I don’t do that. If I need to transfer files I use a temporary folder on my network drive. Most of my files are stored on my network server as I don’t have to worry about losing anything, plus it makes the file accessible from any computer.
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“A workstation is designed to handle multiple tasks or programs simultaneously”
?? That’s true of any computer. Well, certainly any Linux computer…
I’m enjoying your computer saga!
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around and it is beyond impressive on how fast it is and how long the battery lasts. I just have to deal with the fact that a lot the software I use is Windows based.
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At one point, I had two HP-Compaq servers with 256GB of RAM, both with external RAID5 arrays that gave me a whopping 8TB of storage that had six Dell workstations connected to them – not to mention the high-end UPS and Cisco network gear that was connected to a dedicated, high-speed DSL line (da shit back then) – and four of them were dedicated to me doing my stuff (the wife and our girlfriend had the other two workstations). I’d later change from everything being wired to wireless.
Writing. Some gaming. Definitely housing the different music programs (like SONAR, for example) that supported my MIDI-connected keyboards and recording rig. My electricity provider actually called me to find out what the hell I had in my home that was using so much power… and they wound up switching me from a residential account to a business one.
Kinda crazy the shit you will do to support your hobbies and interests, huh? The women wanted to have me committed because they couldn’t understand how or why computer nerds like me needed so much computing power….
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Wow, that’s some serious computing power there!
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Uh huh!
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“a dedicated, high-speed DSL line (da shit back then) ”
That’s one reason I’ve stayed with xfinity/comcast for the past 25 odd years, including two moves.
they rolled out cable based internet in the mid 90’s and i was the second house in my town to get it.
that was long before they had bandwith levels with different pricing.
since i’ve kept the same account, i’m grandfathered in at the big pipe bandwidth, without paying the top tier pricing.
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That’s sweet and I wish I could get in on that deal. I’m kind of in the same deal with my cell. I’ve stuck with the same carrier and my plan was grandfathered in. The rate is beyond good so I’m sort of like your DSL contract.
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Well, at the time I had all of this up and running, Comcast wasn’t offering internet access to my area yet. I had a good ISP… at first but I needed that dedicated line so…
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Oh, I forgot the enterprise-level licenses I had for all Windows products…
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I haven’t quite got to that point. LOL
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Pray that you don’t, Larry…
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