New Computer for Annette

When Annette's last decent computer crapped out, we replaced it (at first) with a HP All-In-One machine that was being disposed of by her work. It seemed pretty good at first contact, and it did have a very nice display, but it turned out (after several hundred dollars of attempted repairs) to be a total lemon.

We tried again with another HP AIO, mainly because it was pretty cheap, but that too turned out to be barely functional. It was grindingly slow, and eventually it fell prey to the AMD video driver curse, which conflicts with the mouse driver and makes the machine almost completely unusable. At first I managed to fix it by rolling back to an earlier driver, but then Windows did a major update which made that impossible.

So, I thought, fuck it. Time for a proper computer.

We reused an old case (though it still needed a new PSU) and the mouse and keyboard, and we got a reconditioned Dell monitor, but everything else is shiny and new and potent and fast. Annette can play Solitaire very, very swiftly.

Everything would be just peachy, except that the Windows 10 installation is terribly unstable; if I tinker at all with any system settings, or attempt to install any software, there's about a 50/50 chance of invoking a BSOD. I suspect some corrupted files in the installation, so I'll try a reinstall/repair and see if that fixes the issues. I certainly hope so.

Update: It was not a corrupt Win10 installation at all, but RAM issues. It turned out that one of the 8GB RAM modules was faulty, and then when we replaced that, it further turned out that one of the RAM banks on the motherboard was faulty. Now we've replaced the motherboard as well, and everything appears to be peachy-keen.

New Monitor Stand

Yesterday I set out to tidy up my workshop a bit. I didn't do much of that, because I got distracted, and accidentally built myself a new monitor stand out of some old rimu shelving.

It's taller than my old one, which is good: hopefully having the monitor a bit higher will help me to avoid slouching in my Kneely-Chair. Now the centre of the display is exactly at my eye-line, instead of me looking down at it.

An added benefit is that now I have a shelf to store my graphics tablet on, instead of having to leave it leaning up against the side of the monitor.

Quite apart from its better ergonomics, it's nicer to look at than my old one, which was just slapped together out of some bits of MDF and a vinyl cover stapled on.

There's nothing much to it in terms of woodwork, just a few housing dados, some glue and some screws. I could probably have got away without the screws to be honest; it's not as if it's ever likely to be under enough physical stress to make them necessary.