Harry Pearce

I developed a version of the Promisance game engine, which is a browser based text strategy game. Check sourceforge.net. Lots of stuff in Java, PHP, etc. that you can look at, build upon, learn from.

My solution with Desktops have always been to add a second Harddrive. Especially with them being so cheap these days, and have one with windows, and the other with BSD/LINUX/Whatever else you want. Laptops, I started using a USB external HDD to do the same thing. I've just always run into problems with partitioning.

I have an old Dell Inspiron 1000 I picked up for $75 to bridge me last summer between when my powerbook died (after 6 years) and MacBooks with Lepoard were out. I ran it the first month with XP pro and never encountered any heat problems even with the battery being dead (basically becoming a resister producing heat). I played around with FreeSBIE and Puppy to make sure everything worked, including the cheap Ativa PCIMA wireless card, as my plan was to turn the machine into a dedicated FreeBSD laptop for development work. (SO I could do programming and use my Macbook for media projects.)Well I noticed that with both systems, if I started watching a movie or video file the machine would just power off for no reason. Just like the power cord had come undone. I thought it was some goofy thing in the media player puppy used. I've seen in happen before with other Linux based systems. FreeSBIE has a Top process running on the XFCE desktop. Well, it did the same thing with mplayer in FreeSBIE. And then I noticed how bloody hot the laptop got. So the next time I watched the CPU temp start at 67 and slowly creep up to74, when it hit 75, boom, the system shut down. This was repeatable.The live OS's weren't throttling the CPU speed, so it was running full blast all the time. So it was over heating (had only happen once in windows when I blocked the fan port with my leg at a coffee shop). It's since become a full time FreeBSD laptop and I configured the kernal to manage the 2.2Ghz Celeron-M CPU a lot better and it's not been a problem. Also I bought a Rubbermain Laptop stand thingy. I've noticed it keeps things about 4 - 5 degrees cooler since air can move around the thing freely. (Both my MB and this Dell). But yeah, the dells have some heat issues.