Requiem For A Trusted Companion
My daily driver workstation is well and truly done.
I had Apple equipment from 2012 through 2019. A MacAir first, then a pair of quad core 16GB i7 MacBook Pro. The Apple kit is slim, light, a joy to work on, but there’s no growth path. This HP Z420 arrived some time in 2019 and we had many adventures over the last five years. It started out as an eight core E5-26xx Xeon, for several years it was a liquid cooled ten core low voltage platform, and finally Gephi forced me to the E5-2695v2, a twelve core with a Passmark of 13,264.
It started getting turned on and off when I moved. First a two port PCIe SATA card died, then the ethernet port became a “maybe” during boot, and finally came the five beep death rattle of failing memory. I suspect it’s a power supply issue. These machines didn’t cost much, so this one was part of a trio and its sibling has taken its place, but I’m just leaving it on and putting up with the fan noise at night.
Having passed the mourning period on the Scraptop, I am uncertain of what to do next. I actually do NEED a mobile Qubes solution, but I’m left with the feeling that I’ll take a 50% productivity hit if I try to make Qubes my regular work environment. Everything runs, yes, but I probably take and paste screen shots into chat a hundred times a day. That’s clumsy at best with Qubes.
The replacement to the Scraptop would be a Dell Precision 7740 with a Xeon E-2276M and the Nvidia RTX 4000, which will be a 64GB system with a 16GB GPU and a Passmark of 11,791. I’m ambivalent about this - the 7730 didn’t feel like a competent desktop replacement, it felt like a quarter of what a proper workstation brings.
My move in the complex at the end of this month has morphed into a full tilt relocation. There are some people in this life who are best handled by moving without a forwarding address. This would have been a lot smoother with a competent eight pound Xeon laptop instead of a forty eight pound workstation. But after the Scraptop experience I’m assuming the worst until I see a system like that doing its job for an entire quarter without a bunch of crazy electromechanical drama.
Farewell, old friend …
