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another AM4 desktop Monday, August 9 2021
The old refrigerator in the Brewster Street house has been so nasty that Eileen bought her own refrigerator, which she took with her when she left. The other day Mustafa and I dragged the nasty old refrigerator out to the curb, and I think the squirrelly squatters at the house on the corner ended up dragging it to the house they're squatting in, as there is now a nasty refrigerator in their front yard. Meanwhile Gretchen ordered a brand new refrigerator for the house, one with the kind of stainless steel exterior that is destined to go unfashionable any day now, consigning millions of kitchens to the category of "dated" despite their subway tile. Gretchen was at the bookstore in Woodstock when a 20 minute warning came from Lowes that the refrigerator was going to be delivered. Since she couldn't leave the bookstore and Eric wasn't painting at the house, it fell to me to drive over and accept the delivery. I brought Ramona, letting her wander the neighborhood while I dug up the problematic bottom step of the front-porch steps in hopes of fixing that thing permanently. I ended up removing 15 gallons of soil (it was almost entirely sand), which I used a bucket to carry to the backyard. In the resulting trench, I seated two and a half concrete blocks I'd brought with me. This would've been the perfect base for the only two-by-ten that had served as the "bottom step," but it was so badly warped that I will have to buy a replacement. That damn step is almost as bad as my punk rock tooth when it comes to the endless series of chores necessary to keep it functional and/or non-hideous.
As for the refrigerator, it proved too wide to get through the front door, but the back door was an inch wider, and the two delivery guys, using a strap hanging between them, were able to walk it in no problem.
Back at the house, I took delivery of yet another AMD CPU, a $100 eight-core Ryzen 7 1700. I hoped that this somewhat-older CPU (it dates to 2017) would be compatible with my somewhat older AM4 motherboard, the one that is incompatible with my six-core Ryzen 5 3600 (unless it gets a BIOS upgrade, which I cannot perform without a working CPU). Happily, the new CPU worked in that motherboard right away, and, better still, one of the sticks of DDR4 RAM I'd thought was bad worked fine in this setup as well. This means I now have two powerful AMD-based desktop computers, one of which is more than twice as fast as Woodchuck and the other of which is more than three times as fast as Woodchuck.
Today I also took delivery of a 1 TB M.2 SSD, which I attached to the motherboard with the Ryzen 3600 and then cloned Wolverine's SSD. It's looking like this will be the new Wolverine. With 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, an M.2 SSD, and that fast processor, it's unlikely I'll be needing anything faster any time soon. For conventional use, Woodchuck, with its 3rd generation Core i5 from 2014, is probably good enough for the foreseeable future, and I will be using it to access Wolverine via Remote Desktop when I have more demanding tasks (such as Angular compilation, even though I'm disappointed with how well my fastest Ryzen processor handles that).
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