Karl’s Asylum ... for the terminally deranged

I must be mad. I’m sat here at my trusty AMD Duron 1800, with 768mb ram and a geforce FX5200 at my disposal. It’s 4 years(ish) old, and it’’s still as quick as you like.

However, I’ve just ordered some new innards for it. An AMD Athlon X2 3800+ dual core CPU, 1gb of DDR2 RAM, and a new motherboard that supports upto 8gb, SATA, all bells and doodas, and even comes with an NVidia Geforce 6100 graphics card built in..for £94. Why? I’m not quite sure.

I suppose a lot of it is due to the fact that the Primary IDE controller on this ASRock board is fried, so I’m limited to the ATA33 secondary controller and 2 drives. I could spend £30 on a new replacement board..but..the cheapness of “new” technology fair took my breath away. I do a lot of Virtual PC work in VMWare for my job, and dual core will work nicely there. The Duron is non too shabby at it either. For instance, I’m writing this using WinXP, inside a Virtual PC running on Ubuntu Linux 7.04..and it’s perfectly useable.

The 1gb of RAM will be useful for this as well..although 768mb is fine, with loads spare as it stands anyway. I could probably play Doom3 as well as this.

I can also see this machine being of use to Jem, who uses photoshop a lot. Her laptop (Athlon 1500, 512mb RAM) struggles a bit there. A dual core should slaughter that. It’s as well I have it hooked up to my 19″ widescreen TFT as well, really. Heh.

I can see me re-casing this Duron, and keeping it as a spare machine..it’s too good to junk, and too fast to retire.

In other news…I have the Astras MOT test on Saturday..will it pass? I hope so..

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 8:45 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.