Pete's Log: esgerbeastie

Entry #1838, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)
(posted when I was 42 years old.)

I bought some hardware:

  • One (1) MSI MPG B550 Carbon Motherboard
  • One (1) AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
  • One (1) G.SKILL 16GB 2X8 DDR4 3600 TridentZ RGB

I reused all the other components of esgerbeast2. It all seems to work pretty well, and I still really like my Fractal Design case. The biggest ongoing annoyance so far is that I can't seem to get the Asus utilities that I no longer need uninstalled from Windows. But for reasons that I'm about to get to, that's not terribly important.

So I was silly and spent the extra $10 or whatever it was to get the RGB RAM, and it was totally worth it for the pretty lights. But what I was not expecting was the pretty lights on the CPU cooler. Apparently my Ryzen came with the Wraith Prism cooler and man is it cool looking. I can just stare at it for days.

The primary motivation for the hardware upgrade (other than a Microcenter giftcard I got for my birthday) was frustration with the previous hardware configuration:

  • Windows 10 feature updates would not install. Over the course of the past three or so years I've probably spent several days worth of effort trying to figure this out, but no matter what I tried, the update would get to 43% and then stall out. I'd have to hard reboot the system. Most of the time I was able to keep Windows from trying to install feature updates, but every so often I'd come to my desk and find my computer stuck on the green update screen. I think I've come to hate that shade of green now.
  • Linux wouldn't boot on my hardware. In response to the above Windows issue, I decided it was finally time to switch back to making Linux my primary OS. I went and bought and installed a second SSD to install Linux on, only to find that I couldn't get it to boot. I tried several versions of several distros with no luck. Changed just about every BIOS setting I could find. Spent hours trying.

So new hardware it had to be. And now Windows is upgraded to 1903, Linux is installed on the second SSD and dual boot is working like a champ, defaulting to Debian of course.

This being me, of course, the install didn't go off entirely smoothly. I was beset with two problems: our internet went down and my optical drive stopped working. On top of that, Windows wouldn't recognize the network interfaces on the motherboard without the drivers on the DVD that came with the board. But I got those issues resolved, and a pleasant side effect is that our internet connection got upgraded from 12 Mbit copper to 1 Gbit fiber, at no extra cost (at least for a year). So that's exciting.

So since the case, power supply, GPU, and drives are still the same as before, it doesn't feel right to dub the machine esgerbeast3. But it's also not quite esgerbeast2 anymore. So I thought well e is between 2 and 3. And also since this time I opted for slightly more modest hardware than with esgerbeast and esgerbeast2, I thought esgerbeastie sounded cute and also sounds like esgerbeast e. Naming things is important.