The old box served well for over half a decade ..... but eventually life was passing me by.... particularly during the FULL boot time being around 10 minutes....
It was [in its day] a fairly decent machine...P4/3.0 in an ASUS P4P800e Deluxe mobo with 2 gig [4x500] ram and eventually about the 'fastest' AGP card still around....a HD3850 with 512 GDDR3...all in an old Lian Li P60, powered by a TruePower 550 Watt PSU.
Then I got hacked....ending up as a mule server for email spam [I think] ... along with my having a Win 7 RC to experiment with prompted me to 'do it' sooner, rather than later.
So, off I went to my fave Comp shop armed with a list...
...and a credit card.
Just a little time later.... I had a boot full of boxes and not much money left.
Thursday last it was....as I get it all home and eagerly started poking and prodding and lots of RTFM-ing.
Friday, and out came the drill and jigsaw to cut a hole into the MoBo tray of the Case ..... so the after-market cooler would fit.... bugger of a bloody big thing it was, too.
By Saturday arvo I was sitting at the dining table with fingers in my ears as I switched it on...no OS, etc....no Keyboard or Mouse .... just to see if lights would come on....and there'd be NO smoke......
They did...and there wasn't.
Sunday...was OS time...so in went Win7 RC1 [32 bit].
Took 4/5ths of eff-all time to install and there it was in all its quasi-Vista 'splendour'.
About the only way to describe it all [other than black - as in the box] was/is "fucking fast".
I ain't got the MoBo drivers all in [Win7 compatibility]...and haven't rebooted yet since the Graphic Card driver install....
Can't even see it in real detail/scale as it's currently on a 17" CRT ....
...and I'm learning all about what won't always work as expected [like Sysmetrix]...but darn it's good...
The 'bits' I already have....to migrate across to the new machine ar the bits that plug in .... The DiNovo Edge KB ...the MS Explorer mouse ...the ASUS M221u LCD....scanners....printers....Logitech G15 wheel and pedals...etc.
What I got....
Lian Li PC-A6010 case [black]
Antec TruePower Quattro 1000w PSU
ASUS P6T-se X58 i7 MoBo
Intel i7 920 2.66Ghz LGA1366 CPU
OCZ 6G-Triple [3x2G] PC12800 Gold Ram
CoolerMaster V8 CPU Cooler [that bloodey big thing]
Vantec EZ2 Sata hot-swap racks x2
1TB Seagate Sata2 7200 HD x2 [for backup/data]
250G Seagate Sata2 7200 HD x2 [for OS]
ACR-105 Multi card reader
LG Sata DVD-RW x2
XFX 1G GTX285 Black Edition [vid]
When Win7 is finally released I'll opt for the 64bit ver...and possibly double the ram....
Funniest thing is....I thought sysmetrix wasn't working....looking at CPU load and ram usage.....till I looked closer....