This morning started with rearranging the office, and ended with a computer upgrade, and a rearranged (if messy) office.

Over the last few days, planned earlier once the carpet installation has been finished, we finally busted the furniture moves to move the missus out of the home office, into a corner of the large family room. This included taking everything off the desk the kids used, moving it into the other room, then taking everything from the wife's desk and moving it to the other room, too. She got all set up and moved around just fine.

We made the move after deciding that another winter sharing an office would be tough. We started the pandemic sharing an office with pretty decent success, and then both had shifts where we had more "talking meetings." Not that we didn't talk in meetings previously, but a turn in the number of meetings we both led, requiring us to talk for most or all of the meeting. I made this work by wandering the house and yard with meetings on my iPad, or taking my laptop with me. It worked, but reduced my screen sizes, 'cause I didn't move the big monitors, or even the old iPad Mini I use as a little monitor (usually hosting my Zoom schedule or Slack).

Now that she's out, the talking meetings are easier. We're far enough away that we're not disturbing each other, and when there is more noise than works, we can shut the office door for additional separation. The latter annoys the dogs, who are just fine being wherever they are, but as soon as the door closes, they each want to be on the other side of it, for at least a moment.

I then decided to rotate my desk, to provide access to my whiteboard, and to make better use of the two desks left behind. I've had my L-shaped desk pointing into the corner before, or with one-side against the wall and the other poking into the room so I'm kind of facing the door, as it's been for the last handful of years. Both of these make it so I have to reach over the desk to use the white board. Turning the desk 180° puts the corner of the desk kind of in the way of the window (which is rarely opened, but puts the wall behind me, and makes the whiteboard completely accessible.

The plan is to take the other L-shaped desk that remains in the opposite corner of the office, and put it also in front of the window facing my desk. My desk has a little extension making it a little longer, but that'll be OK, as the kids will largely be the only users of that desk.

The wife's desk is also an L-shaped desk...for the really curious. The original idea was a bunch of desks around the outside of the room, so that turning around to talk to the others in the office would take advantage of the wide-open space. This worked for a while, as I had friends who would come work with me when I worked at home, sometimes working the same or other gigs, for LAN gaming, or whatever.

I turned my desk around when people stopped sharing the space, to avoid the light through the doorway from splashing on the screens. I'd forgotten about that until I did this, but now I face more to the side, and close the office door more than before, so it's less annoying than I recall.

During this move, I took my aging 100Mb network switch out, and replaced it with a newer, partially-managed, and bigger 1Gb switch. It's not only 10x faster, but has more ports, and a web interface where I can go and monitor or tweak each connection. I also rearranged the cords, getting rid of some of the coils by right-sizing them.

While everything was apart, and I was vacuuming all of the dust and hair and whatnot from the under and between parts, I took the opportunity to air-spray out the big computer boxes. There's my old workstation-turned server, rebuilt last summer when it started intermittently failing, which I don't think I blogged about. It was still pretty clean, but did move a cloud of dust when the compressed air blew through. And then there's my desktop, which I don't think I've opened in a number of years. It was pretty dusty, and took a bit of blowing and gentle brushing to make shiny again. Since it was apart and cleaner, I figured why not give it a little upgrade. I thought it had more RAM than it does, but it didn't...so I peeked and found some reasonably priced DDR2 (it's that old) RAM for a doubling to 16GB. For what I do with it, since I do more heavy lifting on my 32GB MacBook Pro, or my 128GB server, it's been fine, but dogs a little. I ordered some RAM, and it arrived, so I pulled the computer back off its shelf under the desk and replaced the chips.

Oddly, it wouldn't boot. Rather, it would boot, but it panicked shortly after moving past the BIOS and inventory screens. I poked and prodded a bit, swapping DIMMs in and out of sockets in varying combinations. Running memory tests on these revealed that any of the 4GB sticks, in any slot, worked fine. Any two or more sticks, though, would freeze the memory test as it broke through to the second 4GB address space. I found some articles addressing inconsistency with older versions of the memory test, which was sadly the version my BIOS had built-in. There were other articles discussing some of the CAS latency and DIMM components that don't actually pass muster, but I thought less of those as all four of them passed the tests individually.

I gave up, and put the 2GB sticks back in, figuring it ran before and 8GB would be better than the 4GB I could make boot.

Oddly, it wouldn't boot. Again, it started failing. I ran memory tests, and it would test any 2GB DIMM, or any pair, but would fail when it left the first 4GB of addressable memory. I called it inconclusive again, after finding the inconsistency articles. Regardless of the memory testing, I couldn't get the machine to boot, and I was pretty frustrated at that.

I considered for a bit the things I do with it. I use the desktop as a back-up for the servers. I can do without this, as I also use the storage server in the basement as a back-up of the servers, and I back-up much other stuff using Dropbox and GitLab, or could data sources. It's as much for keeping keen on the things that need to be done than for any actual recovery, but it's being done. It's also got a bunch of history and projects and music and so on, much of which is also backed-up to the storage server, but some isn't. And it's configured comfortably, having worked as my most used desktop for years.

So I decided to bite a bullet and replace the mainboard, CPU, and RAM. This is what I'd done to the server earlier, picking a Ryzen 5 with integrated graphics, and dropping for a big (for that box) RAM upgrade; it moved from a hand-me-down dual-core with 8GB to a hyper-thread quad-core with now 16GB of RAM. It runs better than before its upgrade, and rarely comes close to that 8GB, since most of its heavy lifting moved to the big server.

I ripped through my local Micro Center, after peeking at what their website thought they had in mind. I found they had a deal on a Ryzen 7 with integrated graphics, another deal on an ASUS motherboard, and a decent selection of DDR4 16GB memory (so I got 2). I had my kiddo help me and about 30 minutes after I started, the guts of the box were replaced with new guts, and it fired right up. It took a pass through the internet and BIOS settings to find the "legacy" setting I had to enable to get the motherboard to try to boot off the SATA drives, and to pick the drive I wanted it to try first, but then it ripped right up. It ran (seat of pants tested) faster than previously, and opening the System Monitor shows that it's hardly ever busting any CPU over 20%.

For a sanity check, I ran it through an OS update, and it didn't add anything unexpected, so all the good stuff must have just been found. It has integrated WiFi (which I turned off as it's wired to the Ethernet), and Bluetooth (which I enabled to try to use one of my keyboards...maybe later).

Box reassembled and replaced under the desk, and it's running great as a desktop again. A new version of Ubuntu is due any day now, so whatever investigations it might do to align the hardware will get updated then, too.