Computers

Hardware

I use Dell machines at work, and my home machines, until recently, were all built by a local shop. I'd been a reliable customer of theirs until they charged a high amount for a minor repair (changing the CPU fan), at which point I decided to start building computers instead. The latest machines are:

• castor, a development machine.
• sol, a kid's Internet/gaming machine.
• aspen, a machine for a home office.

I highly recommend this over buying from a vendor, since the quality of the parts is much higher, and/or the prices are better. I estimate that this saves 10 to 25% off a comparable Dell system, with components that are better. My advice is not to sacrifice quality for price. I start with the A's: Antec, AMD, and ASUS for cases, power supplies, CPUs, and motherboards.

I highly recommend Building the Perfect PC, and the site hardwareguys.com for background information, and Newegg for components.

Linux

My preferred operating system is Linux, and these are the most recent machines on which I've set it up:

• castor, my primary home machine.
• sal, my primary work machine.
• hemlock, my old primary work machine.
• sol, a kid's machine.

distrowatch.org is my preferred site for comparing distributions. I've been a Red Hat user since the mid-1990s, and only recently began working with Ubuntu. Fedora remains my preferred distribution, especially on "work" machines, although I can see the reason for the success of Ubuntu.