Dell shipped me a loaner top of the line workstation to test, the Dell Precision T7500. I’ll have more on what, specifically, the machine is for later. For now, a quick rundown on the specs, setup and software choices.

The Hardware

This beast comes equipped with two quad core Intel Xeons running at 3.2 GHz, 24 GB memory, and 3×300 GB 10K RPM hard disks. It’s easily the most powerful box I’ve had locally since my mainframe days, in other words. Plugged in to this are the 30″ and 24″ monitors I already had on hand.

The Operating System Choice

The first thing I did when I got the box was try to get my beloved Thinkpad USB keyboard working with the Windows 7 Home Premium instance preloaded on the workstation. I failed. Even after manually installing drivers from the CD that came with the keyboard, Windows insisted that my U, I, O, J, K, L and M keys were instead 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, and 0, respectively. So rather than waste more time tinkering, I gave up and installed Ubuntu.

Rest Here