fun with technology
By anders pearson 20 Apr 2002
some days i just love technology.
<p>i got my tax return a while ago and my first instinct was to buy a new computer; put together something top of the line and expensive. my current machine is an old celeron 400 that i’ve had for almost 3 years now. unfortunately, i have student loans and credit card payments and stuff so i knew i couldn’t really justify spending all that money on a new computer. but if i didn’t do something to make my machine faster, i’d be more and more tempted to go blow a wad of cash on new hardware. </p>
<p>so i spent some time digging around through all the specs of the hardware i’ve got trying to figure out what i could do to improve performance the most for the least amount of money. i filled it up with <span class="caps">RAM</span> last summer when prices fell through the floor so memory wasn’t the problem. anything more than a trivial processor upgrade would probably require a new motherboard (which would probably require new <span class="caps">RAM</span>). speeding up my hard-drive would require either moving to <span class="caps">SCSI</span> (expensive) or <span class="caps">ATA</span>-100 (requiring a new mobo or at least a controller card).</p>
<p>really, what was killing my system the most was the graphics. my computer came with one of those evil onboard <span class="caps">ATI</span> Mach64’s. turning on 3d acceleration for that card actually makes things slower. so i picked up a cheap ($50) GeForce2 MX 400 card.</p>
<p>wow. what a difference. before, i couldn’t even load tuxracer; it would seriously take several minutes just to render the title screen; 3d graphics were out of the question. now it smokes. X windows even loads almost instantaneously now.</p>
<p>it’s probably a pretty sad commentary on the age of my computer that a $50 upgrade can just about double the performance. it’s also not exaggerating much to say that the graphics card has just about as much processing power as the rest of my system. on the positive side, i’ve now extended the lifespan of my computer for quite a bit longer.</p>
<p>while i was at it i picked up a wireless keyboard and mouse so i can take full advantage of my projector. i can now relax on the couch and work on the computer (or play tuxracer). </p>
<p>the keyboard i got is a logitech itouch keyboard. it’s a pretty standard black keyboard with a nice feel to it and about a dozen assorted buttons and controls on it. it comes with windows software that’s supposed to make all the buttons do simple things like take you to a web site with just one keystroke. most interestingly, it has a volume knob and play/stop/ff/rew keys which look like they might actually be useful.</p>
<p>after some experimentation with <tt>xev</tt>, i confirmed that the extra keys were just sending keycodes in the undefined range. with some <tt>xmodmap</tt> tweaking and help from <a href="http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:tdeheWhqpvoC:xmms-shell.sourceforge.net/">xmms-shell</a> and i now have all the buttons working in linux and bound to things that i find useful. i’ve even got a “thraxil” button that takes me directly to this site. :)</p>