Well, just after I got my taxes printed out, my computer (an Athlon 2500+) died the ugly death.
I can't say I'm surprised; this is the one I had
such problems with a year ago. I think at the very least one of the IDE controllers was banjaxed; even after the repair installation, everything ran slowly, and I could never attach a second drive to the IDE cable.
So I'm building a new one. Unfortunately the
new motherboard has only two PCI slots. One will have to go for my SCSI card (until I spring for a new scanner), and the other for my dialup modem (because I have a really flaky DSL connection). That means my TV tuner card goes back into its box (perhaps I can use it in the Ubuntu machine), as does the adapter for a card reader (though I can probably get a new internal one that runs off a USB header).
I'm not going high-end on the processor; I'm getting the
Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane black box 65W, which should handle any work
I'm likely to do. And I'm only getting
2GB of DDR2 800 RAM, because (1) the processor isn't that fast, (2) I'm not overclocking, and (3) I'm going to be running Win XP. I went for only a
320 GB SATA HDD because I have a 500 GB external as backup. If things get really cheap later on, my Antec Sonata case has room for 4 hard drives, and the motherboard has 5 SATA connections; right now, I'll be using the single IDE controller for my DVD burner and my Zip250 drive. I
have bought a new
power supply, partly because the one in the Sonata doesn't have SATA connectors (though adapters are really cheap), partly because I'm not sure it had a 24-pin power connector (the current board is a 20-pin one), and partly for future needs (if I'm ever crazy enough to buy a high-end processor and graphics card).
Anything I should know about, or change?