Rufus The Doofus

It’s been a little over two weeks since lightning blasted some of my stuff. My “computer” life is starting to get back to normal finally.

The new Dell Precision T7400 arrived. I’ve been working on getting it setup for the past few days. It’s a dual quad-core Xeon system so I installed Windows Server 2008, the SQL Server 2008 release candidate, Visual Studio 2008 and a whole host of other stuff that I need to do my job. I’ve never used Windows 2008 or SQL 2008. (I used SQL 2005 only briefly.) That’s all brand new to me but I’d like to jump into it as I get into .NET development. So far I’m underwhelmed with the software but the computer is screaming fast.

There’s just so much time involved in switching from an old system to a new one. I’ve spent about 20 hours just installing programs, doing backups, moving data, getting stuff configured, etc., etc. At least this will hopefully be the last time I need to do this for a very long time. This new system is fast enough that I shouldn’t need another one for at least 8 - 10 years and since we’ve done away with our underground network cabling I hopefully won’t have any more lightning problems.

It took me a couple of days to get the wireless link between the two buildings set up to my satisfaction. I ended up trimming a bunch of the lower-hanging branches from the trees around the wood shed. That made a huge difference in signal quality and throughput. I should have set up a wireless link a long time ago. The $250 in wireless hardware would have saved me countless hours of aggravation and damaged equipment.

I hope to be able to get back to work tomorrow uninterrupted by computer “issues”. We’ll see.

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