Building a Beauty

By Jerry Pournelle

May 2, 2005

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Column 297 (Continued from the Previous Week)

The Latest and Greatest: Satine

Every now and then I feel the need to get away from everything, further than the Monk's Cell. Sometimes Niven and I will go off on a combination research and writing trip. We've been doing that since before there were laptops and portable computers, so we got used to hauling a fairly large machine around.

As I observed earlier, I have no real need of computer upgrades: Just about all my machines are more powerful than any software they are likely to run, at least for the next year or so. On the other hand, computers get faster and better, and I do like to keep up with the industry; so I cast about for a good excuse to build a new machine.

I decided to build the ultimate luggable: more powerful than any laptop. Since it would periodically be thrown into the back of my Explorer and hauled out to places like Death Valley and Chaco Canyon, it needed to be reliable as well as fast. That meant a Raid 1 (mirrored disk drives) system as well as the capability to copy creative work onto an external drive.

I also wanted this to be a screaming games machine. The idea is that it will become my main writing machine, replacing the Intel Prescott I'm using to write this column with. When the time comes to go on a trip, either to the desert or down to the beach house, I just pull the plugs and take the system along.

Since my main writing machine is also my games machine, this meant a fast system with great graphics capabilities.

The result is Satine. There's a story that goes with how she got that name.

Super Lanboy

One recent trend among gamers is the LAN party: Six or eight gamers show up with their computers. The systems are all hooked together into a temporary Local Area Network (LAN), and they all play the same game. This is usually an action shooter hosted on one of the systems, but it can be a strategy game, a role playing dungeon, or even a sports simulation.

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