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Stupid Computer Question #62

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DNK

DNK

Great Pumpkin
Offline
So my daughter is building a computer( I guess I am doing the building,she just bought the parts) as it seems WINDOWS is the preferred OS for most of the programs in her field.
So , my question.
She was told to build it out of the box to test everything first.
Now, since there is no OS installed (here's the stupid part) how can you tell it works???
 
If it doesn't smoke when you plug it in, that's a good sign. If you haven't purchased a copy of Windows yet, you could download a copy of Linux off the internet. It would come as an ISO image that you would burn to a DVD. Pop that in the new computer and boot it up making sure that the DVD drive is a bootable device in the BIOS.
One place to go would be HERE and download the 64bit LXDE spin.

When you say she was "told", is this a class project?
 
BTW, booting from the DVD doesn't load anything onto the hard drive. So you won't have to worry about reformatting it when you install Windows. It will give you a desktop where you can see if the CPU, memory, power supply and video work as they should.
 
Not a class project.
She needs a powerful computer for rendering.
She has been doing a lot of reading (that's were the told part comes in) and a very close friend who is a classmate and an IT guy will be on Google cam or something to help

She plans on partitioning the drive and use Linux as most of the school computers are running it

I'd ask her now, but she doesn't talk for at least 2 hours after she gets up
 
Just asked her the top question
She rolled her eyes as if to say
"Stupid old guy!"
 
DNK said:
She rolled her eyes as if to say
"Stupid old guy!"
Click to expand...
That would have been the moment I'd have let her do the project on her own.

It has been a while since I've installed Windows, and never Win8. What I found in the past is the more capable the computer, the more things Windows turns on during the install. Microsoft does this so the masses have convenience, but I hate having stuff run in the background that I don't want. Indexing is one thing. That will start running in the background when there is no human input (mouse clicks). Problem is, it may start running during the hours it takes to render an animation.
To save myself manual work turning stuff off, I will pull most of the ram out before I install the OS. I've been known to install smaller ram chips temporarily from another computer as long as they are compatible. The best I did was 19 processes running on an idling computer that had a functioning network. A friend's computer I've worked typically has 75 to 83 processes going.
 
And with a dual boot box, you would need to load the Micro$hite O/S first, as it never likes to share drive space with Linux. I'd suggest two drives, swap to whichever O/S needed.

Greg said:
That would have been the moment I'd have let her do the project on her own.
Click to expand...

Amen, brother.
 
I'm no help on this subject the last time I actually built a computer I installed Windows 98 on it, and was running a P3 450.
 
It has like a 6" fan on the top, one fan on the back , 2 fans on the drives, the power supply fan, and the graphics has 3 fans.
Believe it or not.
You can barely hear them.
There is also a fan speed control on the front console
 
So she's partitioning the hard drive and is adding the Penquin.
Which program do you suggest?
 
When you say program, do you mean OS? As in Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint? Also, how many hard drives are on this system and how big are they?
 
There are so many distros of Linux, it is hard to figure out which would be best. My thought is one that doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles working in the background. That would rob from the CPU cycles when rendering. Fedora has several versions called "Spins" that are tailored to specialized computing. One of them is geared towards design so it has Blender, Gimp, Inkscape and other programs in that vein bundled with it. I would hope that the OS has been streamlined to handle these programs, especially Blender. I'm just not sure. I also didn't see which desktop it was using, though that can be changed at any time. Here is a link to it Design Suite . The downside to Fedora is a fast upgrade cycle. There are constant updates, and new releases come out about every 6 months. Once you are a release behind, there aren't really any more updates and the OS will still work. I've been a couple releases behind with no problem.

Mint is another distro that is popular. I couldn't get it to do what I wanted (low latency audio) so I dumped it after a short time. I didn't care for the Ubuntu interface, but that may just be me. That was another short lived try.
 
CEntOS. Install the "workstation" version and add the programs selectively. Fedora is a bit too "automagic" for my taste. A side benefit of CEntOS is the experience gained with Red Hat (the most widely used Linux distro in commercial circles). Ubuntu, Mint, et al are fine for just 'get-er-done'. the Ent in CEntOS is for "Enterprise"... as in server capable at install. And you decide if you want to "upgrade" it, no nag stuff popping up.
 
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