[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“The old file/print server”] [/caption]

A few years ago I heard about the Fit-PC. It was a computer that was the size of a stack of two or three CD jewel cases running Ubuntu. This was pretty cool, but, most importantly, it only used 15 watts of electricity when under highest load. At first I entertained using it to replace Danielle’s computer to save space in the crowded office we had in the apartment. But the fact that the computer couldn’t easily be upgraded put the kabosh on that. Eventually I turned my attention to replacing our file and print server with one of these. There was just one problem, they cost somewhere in the $300 range so they don’t really pay themselves off quickly enough in electricity saved.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Everything but the RAM”] [/caption]

14 Sept Sometime in my junior or senior year of college I came across a book about building my own computer and resolved to do it.  My tribulations with my Dell computer were enough to convince me that building computers with generic parts was the way to go.  Later experience with my Emachine and the inability to tack on a DVD-writer (because they had blocked the slot with a metal mesh) confirmed this was the case.  Just under five years ago I was finally able to do this and built my [first computer](/2006/01/03/new-computer-built/ /2006/01/07/building-the-computer/).   I can’t believe it took me four hours to put that first one together.  Nowadays, if things go well, it takes about an hour.  In the time since then I’ve built 8 other computers.  Of course, those weren’t all for me.  I also built Dan and Dave’s newest computers, my father-in-law’s computer, his sister’s computer, and a bunch of others.

I never really knew much about how CPUs worked until I took a class in CPU design at Cornell.  Until that point I never knew about registers and cache and pipelines.  Ever since then I’ve been growing in my understanding of how the CPU works and how all the parts fit together.  This culminated in me building five or six computers for myself and relatives.  In that past few years, these computers have been dual or quad core computers.  I’ve been using a dual core computer for my Linux computer for around a year now but I didn’t really think about it too much until this weekend.  I was working on a new strip for my webcomic, " I’m Not Mad"  (which I do with Nothing to the Table’s Daniel).  A particular panel was taking forever to render, so I opened up the system monitor to take a look.  The image was split into a bunch of squares and each square was given to a CPU core to work on.  And, for basically the entire render time, both CPUs were maxed out as I expected.  When it only had one square to do, one of the CPUs dropped to idle because there wasn’t anything for it to do.  Nothing out of the ordinary there.  But then I noticed this crazy pattern: