Upgrading
Posted By Russ Emerson on March 17, 2009 at 3:58 pm
So, I noticed the other day that my PC was beginning to sound rather a lot like a kitchen blender. Or maybe a Disposall.
The box usually runs 24×7, and has done for most of the last six, count ’em, six years — except, of course, when it was broken. The noise level has been sort of creeping up on me, but lately it’s really become a nuisance. It reached the tipping point last week while I was working, and I couldn’t hear a particular customer on the phone.
Not that noise by itself is indicative of a need to replace the machine… but come on, it’s six years old. When I bought it, I did so with the express intent of having a machine that would remain relatively current, relatively useful, relatively non-obsolete for five years. It’s mostly lived up to that intent.
But now, it’s not doing everything I want it to do any more. I’ve upgraded and replaced bit and pieces, but now it’s maxed out. It’s at its limit.
Part of the problem is that it’s an AGP machine in a PCI world. It’s just no longer possible to get the kind of replacement parts I might want.
So rather than continue to pour cash into a dinosaur, I’ve opted to get a new machine. I went to the local place I’ve used in the past, and with the help of a salesman, built a system. Intel Quad-core processor, 6 gigs of memory, awesome video card, DVD burner, and a full terabyte of hard drive.
Oh, and I’m sticking with XP Pro. Vista has no attraction for me. Sure, I know XP can’t access all the memory the machine will have, but eventually there will be an OS worth upgrading to.
They’re building the PC now, and I’ll probably pick it up Monday, after they do their burn-in and testing. It ought to last me a while.
I find myself somewhat stunned by the hard drive I mentioned above. When I was in school in the mid-1990s, one of the case studies we looked at involved a major corporation’s servers and data flow. Their total data storage for daily operations was four terabytes in 1995.
That company was FedEx.
Pretty remarkable.
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