I recently found the Sun Try and Buy program which sounds too good to be true. You get a computer free for 60 days with no credit card or anything. All you really need is a business tax ID and a bit of time.
Most people, including my previous self, think that Sun only makes
servers that run the SPARC processor. It turns out they offer AMD x64
processors and workstations using these processors.
After
finding the program I gave Sun a call to figure out what the catch was.
After half an hour on the phone with the salesman I found out that Sun
believes in their products so much that they are willing to give you
this hardware for a trial period. At the end of the call, which was
only supposed to be a fact finding mission, I placed my order for the
Ultra 20 M2. They have three versions of this computer you can get small, medium, and large. I got the large. Hey, if you are getting a free computer for 60 days might as well go all out.
About
two weeks later two FedEx packages come with my name on it. In one
package the keyboard, mouse, and a few other things. The other box is
the good one, the computer and all the paperwork the comes along with
it. I immediately forgot what I was doing prior the the package arrived
and started to get the new computer setup.
The
first thing I did after taking the computer out of the box was opened
it up. The first thing you can tell is that it is made to upgrade.
Every single part is easily accessible to replace or upgrade. It looks
like a really good custom computer inside a retail box. It’s simply
amazing.
The
first bootup was almost scary, no video output. The problem was I was
using the analog VGA output rather than the DVI on the NVIDIA card. The
computer has a VGA port that gets disabled if it has a PCI card
installed. After a bit of research to find this out I took the video
card out and it booted up like a charm. I later grabbed a VGA to DVI
converter to use the graphics card to get better resolutions. 1024×768
just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Solaris comes preinstalled on all
Buy and Try systems. This was my first experience with this OS and it
reminds me of a bad cross between Windows and Linux. The GUI reminds me
of Windows while the command line of Linux. It also took me 4 hours to
get all of the latest patches for the system, hey that’s like Windows.
It came preinstalled with quite a bit of software, but it was all quite old. I tried to compile my own version of GAIM
without any luck. I looked for guides to get stuff up to date, no luck.
All of the software sites I found were just as out of date. After a
half day of playing with Solaris I decided that if I really wanted to
test the system I would have to install Linux.
A quick install
of xubuntu I was up and running in my native environment. I tested the
system with quite a few different tools and the sucker scored in the
top rankings all the time. I grabbed a copy of SETI and ran it for a
while, great speeds.
After testing it for quite a while and compiling a few things I moved over to Vista.
One neat feature about Vista is the fact that it rates the computers by
their hardware. I have no idea how they come up with these numbers, but
it gave an overall 5.1 score.
Overall this is one of the
nicest systems I have used in quite some time. Everything in the
computer is made for speed and to grow with the user. This is my new
recommendation for anyone who wants a non-entry-level computer.
