One of the things I did during my vacation last week was order up some parts to upgrade my computer at home. It had been 5 years since my last upgrade so it was time. I debated whether to buy a new pre-built system from Dell or use my mad computer tech skillz to perform a DIY upgrade. I have done the latter every time I have needed an upgrade so that's the route I chose this time. The parts arrived on Saturday and I performed successful upgrade surgery before leaving for the concert at UMSL.
(which, by the way, was AWESOME. The Gordon Goodwin Big Phat Band is stocked full of the best Los Angeles studio players and they were at the top of their game. I hope they had fire extinguishers handy because they durn near set the place on fire!)
I started from scratch with a fresh load of Windows XP and all the programs that I use. I only had a couple of minor glitches when the new system board suddenly began short circuiting, due to its coming in contact with metal in the computer case. That meant it would power on for a few seconds, then power off. A few minor adjustments solved that problem.
For anyone who's interested here's my new setup:
ASUS M2N-E Socket AM2 system board
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.01ghz) dual-core energy efficient CPU
1GB Crucial DDR-2 RAM (512 MB x2)
Thermaltake 430-watt power supply
WD CaviarSE 160GB SATA2-300 hard drive
Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce 7300GS PCI-E graphics card (512MB RAM - 256MB onboard)
(all from mwave.com)
I kept my Plextor CD writer and Sony CD-ROM drive along with my 80GB IDE hard drive. The Sony CD-ROM is attached to the on-board IDE and I have a SIIG Ultra-ATA 133 PCI controller card running the other two drives. I also kept my Dell flat-panel LCD.
The new system is really, really fast. The few video games that I play look fabulous and run much more smoothly. I can finally run iTunes with my iPod in real time. My digital photo processing should be much faster as well. This should do me for at least another 5 years! : )
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on a completely unrelated note, it really stinks to get to work and find that you left your lunch sack at home on your kitchen counter! *EDIT* it turns out I left it in my car, not at home.
1 comment:
i am terribly impressed with all that tech-no-babble i just read. clearly your college education paid off. i could read manuals for tha tstuff for 10 yrs straight and never manage to overhaul my computer. oh, and whitney says ditto on the lunch sack thing!
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