Upgrade time! Yay!

Hooray! Sarah agreed to let me order an upgrade for my desktop!

This is the first big, i.e. multi-component, upgrade I've had in 5 years. I got all the parts on Wednesday, installed them on Thursday, did the trouble-shooting on Friday and this morning, and am not posting this from my fully upgraded machine. And boy is it fast! Or, rather, it's fast compared to my pre-upgrade machine and the piece of crap laptop they gave me to use at work.

My pretext for this upgrade was actually a previous upgrade. For my birthday, I got a $50 Newegg gift certificate, which I used to order a new 1TB Samsung hard drive, because my 750GB Western Digital drive was down to about 20GB free. The up side is that between the gift card and a sale, I only paid $10 for the new drive. The down side was that I forgot to do my homework, so it turned out that the drive only supported 3Gb/s SATA II. Which was great, except that my old motherboard only did 1.5Gb/s SATA. So it was either upgrade, or buy a SATA II controller, which seemed like a waste of money.

So this upgrade was basically replacing the guts of the system - motherboard and CPU. I ordered myself an ASUS M4N68T-M microATX socket AM3 board, with integrated audio and NVIDIA GeForce 7025 video. I might have gotten something a little better, except that I had to set aside $25 of my budget for a new power supply, because my old one was making some troubling noises. For the CPU, I splurged a bit and got a 2.8GHz Athlon II X4 quad-core processor. I topped that off with 4GB of Crucial RAM (because 8GB was outside my price range).

So now I've got a quad-core with decent RAM, a modern video card (even if it is integrated) to replace the 64MB Radeon 7000 I'd been using, which didn't even support Compiz, and a bit under 2TB of total storage. Plus I can use the old 160GB hard drive I took out of my system in another old box which I intend to hook up to one of my TVs a low-end digital video player.

And for the first time in a long time, Ubuntu flies on my system!

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