... is now a very thin magazine. That's not what this is about.
I made a couple of poor choices building my last desktop machine.
I do love the technology, but it does often seem to be trying to screw me through a seemingly endless stream of issues that stop me from achiving the fairly simple things I want to achieve.
Let me explain.
Today I received a £200 electricity bill for a three month period. For a family that might be acceptable but for a single person that's simply the highest bill i've ever seen.
I can almost certainly attribute this to having been running my desktop machine wide awake 24 hours a day for the last 2 months it's existed due to not being able to come up with a satisfactory way of being able to wake it up or shut it down from other machines on my simple home network.
The piece of shit I replaced it with did all of this. I could wake it up and I could shut it down from my damn phone.
How many problems could possibly be involved in this equation, you ask (my question mark key is missing, sorry).
- The fairly well featured Gigabyte motherboard I have seems to support waking but damned if I can tell if magic packet is one such way, and trying certainly hasn't revealed it to be.
- Windows Shutdown command requires group policy changes. Windows 7 Home Premium offers no policy changes. I can't obtain the admin rights required to execute a remote shutdown the correct way. Have to use VNC I guess.
- Real VNC is unstable on Windows 7 and freezes for seemingly no reason most of the time.
So, I can't shut the fucker down or wake it up without being the room. At least I can make it go green after 20 minutes of nothing going on, right (again, no question mark key)
- Course not. The M-Audio 2496 in truth fairly unstable on 7 soundcard that everybody fucking loves so much can't sleep, ever, and much like a screaming child, if 2496 is awake, everyone else is awake too. Therefore, even a basic low resource time-out is out of the question. I've tried a workaround, and with this setup at least, work they don't.
Why can't I just switch the machine off when I leave the room (question mark) Why do you think (question mark) It's obviously my fucking home server media machine. It needs to be somewhat on demand.
So, in summary:
DON'T buy an M-Audio Audophile 2496 sound card if you care about using sleep or indeed want a stable card. Somebody PLEASE show me how wrong I am to make this statement.
DON'T think Windows 7 Home Premium is enough if you want to do anything but use Windows Media Player and IE. Somebody PLEASE show me how wrong I am to make THIS statement.
DON'T buy Gigabyte motherboards. Their documentation is very unclear. That's just a fact.
And finally...
If you're the kind of person that puts off buying something for far too long because you really want to do all the necessary research and make the right choice, just fucking buy it, because honestly I read every last detail of all of the above and at no point did I think anything I was buying wouldn't do something the crap I was replacing did without any difficulty.
The crap, incidentally:
- An ABit AV8. Best motherboard I ever owned. Woke when I told it to.
- Creative SBLive! That's right, that old. Never had a problem with sleep.
Yeah i'm just pissed off with all this.