A little while ago I finished building a six-core workstation to replace my works-just-fine dual-core. Yesterday I rearranged the home office to put it into primary machine position.

While the dual-core works just fine, it's being re-purposed as my small server, to replace the aging AMD Sempron I have running my mail, web, DNS, and other services. The Sempron is running fine, but has run into some upgrade issues, and is running the risk of killing its PSU soon (it's starting to moan a little bit--goo in the fan grease, I'm guessing).

The dual-core had 8GB of RAM in it, while the six-core only had 2GB. I swung by the MicroCenter to grab a couple more 1GB sticks (on sale cheap at $22 each), thinking I'd make each machine be 6GB. While dorking around in the machines, I moved all 8GB to the six-core and put the 4x1GB in the dual-core. I realized that it'll soon be ignored, except as a server, and the one that it's replacing now has only 2GB, and it isn't even using that...small use demands small servers...

When I put the new sticks in the dual-core, it barked. I hadn't paid attention to the boot, so I thought maybe it was complaining at the sudden loss of RAM. I rebooted and watched; the BIOS posted fine, and the boot menu timed-out correctly, and then the Ubuntu loader exploded. I rebooted again and tripped down the menu to the memtest, and it revealed that there were bad bits on one of the sticks. I pulled the new sticks, re-ran the test, and got success. I put the sticks in again, thinking maybe it was a seating issue, but still failure. I reversed the sticks, and still failure, without any helpful indication of which stick... I didn't think to pair the new sticks with the old, which I knew to work, to figure out which one is bad. Instead, I've got 'em in my coat pocket and will again visit MicroCenter to swap 'em out there. In the meantime, dual-core is running with dual gigabytes.

I also wanted to finally take advantage of the collection of LCD monitors I'm starting to accumulate. Usually I take one to the other workspace and plug it into my laptop to make it dual monitor (the built-in 17" at 1920x1200 makes for smaller, but smoother letters). I've got a 1920x1200 22" hovering over my desk, and the old 1650x1080 20" sitting idle next to it). So the six-core is now attached to those two, and the dual-core is attached to the 18" 1280x1024 (wow does that loo big) tucked into the corner. I use Synergy to connect the same mouse and keyboard (actually plugged into the six-core) to both PCs.

I removed my KVM, giving me some new desk real estate ('though with the swamping piles of magazines and other disrupted stuff from the other work, it really isn't a gain).

I pulled my 5.1 speaker system, too, just to get some time to clean everything. Neither system is plugged into speakers, but tonight when I'm sticking new RAM in the dual-core I'll probably drag an audio to its monitor, and may try to figure out something similar for the hex-core to the 24". Yeah, monitors give crappy sound, but really I've waned from playing anything more than background video or audio, and I don't need to rumble the thunder of the machine guns in the few games I might play on it. Most of the gaming now happens on the PS3, which is hooked up to a bigger 5.1 sound system.

So, now I just need to get back into the office and start taking advantage of all of my cores, with its new burst of RAM!