This image makes 60,000 indexed items. A fair whack of that would be email, but far out that’s a lot of infor­ma­tion. (It’s not just a count of files on a sys­tem, that’s just indexed doc­u­ments in my home dir, projects work­space, and email accounts)

New lap­top arrives Mon­day morn­ing, and I’m try­ing to decide if I even want to move every­thing off this desk­top or not! The lap­top has half a TB of disc space across 2 dri­ves (17″ mon­ster), so I’m con­sid­er­ing it. I pur­chased it as a desk­top replace­ment sys­tem and it is quite capa­ble of that (specs at end of post)! The desk­top pro­vides a good backup should the lap­top die/get stolen/run over by a bus, but at present the data is organ­ised to be used, not archived.

By “used”, of course, I mean that lib­er­ally dis­or­gan­ised but most-recently-used-on-top sort of struc­ture we fall into so eas­ily. So I have a spot of sort­ing to do to get every­thing onto the laptop.

My last com­puter still has some stuff I’d like to get off it (par­tic­u­larly uni work… to the crit­ics, yes, I do still go to uni!) but it’s been in at Youth­works not doing much since we moved offices, but heavy enough I haven’t both­ered bring­ing it home again, since late last year.

The prob­lem with desk­tops in par­tic­u­lar is that they aren’t worth sell­ing for their poten­tial use­ful­ness. My several-years-old com­puter (2.4GHz/768MB/somethingsomething… Ubuntu) in at Youth­works could maybe just sell for $350 given a clue­less enough eBayer. My cur­rent desk­top (no great slouch, AMD64 X2 4200+/2GB/7600GS) would be worth about the same to some­one who knew what they were talk­ing about… or per­haps $750 on eBay!

Even so — it’s use­ful to have spare machines ‘just in case’ (for pro­duc­tion stuff espe­cially). I’d love to be able to swap those two desk­tops for lap­tops of sim­i­lar vin­tage, but it’s just never going to be cost-effective. When peo­ple get rid of lap­tops, it’s because they suck (falling apart/general abuse, crap bat­tery life, rub­bish specs to start with, etc.). Not so with desk­tops, wherein most faults are redeemable at min­i­mal cost. And even that min­i­mal cost is often negated by the fact that there’s so much in the way of ‘spare’ parts around the place!

Tags: eBay, Ubuntu