Frankenputer!

My wife and son(s) share a computer here in the home office. And they suffer greatly from the “who will shoe the cobbler’s family” syndrome (yeah, I paraphrased). Actually, my own home machine is getting a bit dated for that matter (barton 2500+). But they had it much worse — the mighty Duron 750. Sure, it had 512MB and was running a (recently) clean install of win2k Pro, but it was getting to be too gimpy. I felt guilty watching the wife work with photos, for example.

[side comment: Ghz don't matter. Want to surf the web and check email (like 90% of the world seems to do)? That 750, or my daughter's 500mhz PIII are MORE than adequate. Dated? Sure. Capable? Yep. Almost all of my home stuff is based off of things folks were looking to dump and I tend to find that just silly.]

Confession: that duron unit had one major issue — it would completely freeze at least once a day. I suspected the video card at first. GeForce 4200ti with some miles on it and a dead fan. However, I was starting to suspect the NIC, of all things, towards the end. Seemed like it would lock up most predictably when moving data to or from network shares. IRQ’s seemed fine. *shrug* In fact, I couldn’t back it up directly to the server today. Locked up hard 3 times in a row as soon as I’d start copying her “My Docs.” I had to access her machine and her share from my machine and act as the middle guy. Which worked fine. Weird, but worked.

A great friend was doing some upgrade work for some of his friends and donated some parts this past week. In other words, their old junk. An older ECS mobo with a AMD 1500+ CPU, 512MB and, the coup de grace, a GF4200ti 128MB card with a working fan. Well heck! We got ourselves an upgrade in the making. Today I picked up a new NIC for $14 at Walmart and, using the old (very old. like 7 years old) case/PSU and drives (20GB hd, 52x CD) cobbled together something that sure feels a helluva lot faster.

Assembly was a breeze. It all worked on the first power up. That’s always a great feeling! Got (licensed) XP Pro going and patched and we’re still looking pretty solid. Only snag I hit was when I grabbed the newer gforce drivers from Windows Update. I should’ve known better, but this isn’t a gaming rig so it seemed logical at the time. That set me back to 4bit color in 640×480 mode until I went and got proper drivers from nVidia.com. Back on track after those were installed.

Thanks Hans — you and your friends rock.

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