The Hood

The old Athlon XP 2500+ died last week, so it was time for an upgrade anyway. The old beast hadn’t been upgraded for a while. It did have a new monitor, keyboard and hard-drives, but it was getting slow. The case was cheap in 2002 so probably the whole thing was running a little hot. It had 80+320+120GB hard-drives, 1GB DDR RAM and an AGP video card (ATI 9200 from memory). It was only crashing in the week before it died permanently. I was planning on buying a SATA PCI card for it so as to get more space, so I’m glad I didn’t now.

I went ahead and bought the parts to build a brand new tower: Q9400 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 2×1TB SATA2 drives and 9600GT PCI-E video card. It is contained within an Antec Three Hundred case, which is nice. This is the first case I’ve owned that hasn’t cut me during installation! I’m also running the Windows 7 release candidate on it, which is actually working out pretty well. There was a problem with XBMC (on the old Xbox) not being able to connect to it over the network, but upgrading XBMC fixed the issue. I’ll probably use this until March 2010, when it will start shutting off after 2 hours. I could either go back to Windows XP or Ubuntu, or work something else out.

The computer scores 7.2 on CPU and memory speed and 5.9 on the other benchmarks on the “Windows Experience index”, which isn’t too shabby. I’m not sure how to improve on those scores, other than spending (too much) money. Sometimes it does feel sluggish, but after it gets going it is much faster. It seems hard-drive speed is the biggest bottleneck at the moment.