Heidi’s parents’ PC died last week. It looks like a hard-drive failure, which could be very dissapointing if the data is unrecoverable (let’s hope not!). I’d spoken to them recently about getting a new PC and today I took the afternoon off work to buy the parts, build the PC, and set it up.<\/p>\n
We picked the parts up from NetPlus<\/a> in Osborne Park. They’re in a pretty convenient location (near the Hutton St exit from Kwinana Fwy) and I’ve found them to have good prices and prompt service in the past. The PC I decided upon is basically the cheapest decent machine I could put together from parts they had in stock… with a nice case<\/a> though. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Here are the specs of the machine:<\/p>\n My first thought when putting the PC together with Heidi’s dad was that the Minuet case was a little larger (deeper) than expected, but it’s still much smaller than a standard tower case. It was a nice case to work with though, and the build was pretty painless.<\/p>\n After seeing that Windows XP would add $150 to the price, Heidi’s dad decided to try out Ubuntu<\/a> (this made me very happy, although I tried to keep that on the inside). I burnt a installation CD last night and figured that I would live boot it to so that he could check it out and make sure it was really going to be okay (Windows can be a hard habit to break).<\/p>\n Honestly, I expected some things to require some “encouragement” to work, but everything worked flawlessly. Upon booting in Ubuntu, the machine was on the internet (via ethernet via the modem\/router), the ATI graphics chip was supported (and then accelerated after the first update), the monitor was working at native resolution (1440×900), sound was working, and even the printer was automatically detected and configured. We connected his Ricoh digital camera via USB cable and F-Spot<\/a> imported everything just fine.<\/p>\n I also had some apphrension as to whether Heidi’s parents would warm to the Linux alternatives to the Windows software they are used to. However, they seemed at home with Evolution<\/a> (rather than Outlook), Firefox<\/a> (rather than IE), and Open Office<\/a> (rather than Microsoft Office). I think that the general feeling was that they were impressed with the ease of setup, and how everything “just worked”.<\/p>\n Bottom line<\/strong>: Good times Ubuntu. You exceeded even my expectations… let’s hope that you can keep it up (and that they don’t ask for Windows after week or so trial).<\/em><\/p>\n I should also extend some kudos to AMD\/ATI<\/a>. There was a time that I would never contemplate getting an ATI card because the Linux drivers sucked so bad, but this machine was running a zippy Compiz desktop on an integrated graphics chip. Sweet and cheap!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Heidi’s parents’ PC died last week. It looks like a hard-drive failure, which could be very dissapointing if the data is unrecoverable (let’s hope not!). I’d spoken to them recently about getting a new PC and today I took the afternoon off work to buy the parts, build the PC, and set it up. We … Continue reading “New PC with Ubuntu for the (soon-to-be) in-laws”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paLsRH-bd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4553,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions\/4553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n