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What have you done to your computer?

ONLY NICE THINGS

23:45 / 11.09.04

Just wondering after a day at the computer fair, trying to remember how many PCI slots I had left...

I got this computer a few years ago now, and have been upgrading it recently essentially to offset my frustration at having been a bit broke when I got it, and thus having gone for a low-end model - ultimately I know that the problem here is the 1.8GHz Celeron processor, which means replacing the motherboard also, which is just too big a task to get into right now...

So, I've just bunged in a PCI 802.11g card, because I was getting hacked off with having a USB dongle kicking around. I pondered getting a USB 2.0 PCI card at the same time, but decided (correctly) that it would get too close to the fan of the graphics card I added a month or so ago (GeForce FX5200 - bit tiny but I wanted the cheapest DirectX 9 card going, and again not to have to replace the PSU), so moved the two USB 2.0 sockets hooked to the motherboard up to below the AGP slot, and got a powered USB 2.0 hub instead. All seems to be working so far. I pondered taking out the 10/100 card, as I have stopped using it, but you never know when it might come in handy.

So, what have you added to your compy?

00:19 / 12.09.04

Since I've just gotten a new Fuck-Off Powerbook I haven't added anything else to it, apart from half a gig of RAM. It comes with Aiport Extreme and Bluetooth built in anyway. And it's a laptop. And they don't really lend themselves to being upgraded.

The old G3 iBook I had went through various memory upgrades, peaking at 640 meg RAM, and also got an Airport card. As well as that it sprouted a USB Bluetooth dongle. It got plugged into a USB hub that incorporated a number of other devices, keyboard, mouse, Palm cradle... and a Firewire hard drive is always useful for storing a decent amount of music and those BTed films.

I'm currently looking for names for the aforementioned computers incidentally. The pbook is called "Hypercube" and the iBook, "Cubette". I quite like Cubette, it's a bit like Smurfette, but I'm not entirely happy with Hypercube. (There's a story behind it but not one that I'm entirely happy with.)

Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey

00:31 / 12.09.04

I had a 450MHz P3 about 18 months ago and decided to replace the 14Gb hard drive with a bigger, 120Gb one. Went home and fitted it, only to realize it was too big for my BIOS to recognize it.

Went out and bought a new motherboard with a spangly Athlon XP 1800+, fitted the new HD to it, then realized my RAM wouldn't fit, so went out and bought 1Gb of DDR RAM. By now, my graphics card was just simlpy too crap to put on, so I bought an nVidia card, which was nice.

I put all this together, then found that my power supply simply wasn't powerful enough, so bought a 450W PSU. Nice. It worked.

A few months later, I decided to get a new processor; an Athlon XP 2800+, which needed a new heatsink and fan combo to cool adequately. I fitted it, but then realized that the bus speed of my motherboard wasn't up to running the new CPU at its full speed, so I spent another 130 quid on a new all-singing, all-dancing Gigabyte Mobo. This had 8X AGP, so I bought a Hercules Radeon 9800Pro graphics card (sold my old one on eBay, at a profit!).

By now, my old case was looking shabby, so I bought a flashy, super-cooled case to put it all in. SInce then I've strapped on an external firewire 200Gb HDD, a sexy LCD monitor and a 5.1 Dolby Digital sound system, as well as new printer and, very recently, a USB scanner (something I've never had before). The only part remaining from my original computer is the floppy drive, which has remained unused for over 12 months...

04:56 / 12.09.04

Bought a P3 450 in '99 at a pirate discount warehouse. Popped in a Voodoo 3500TV card right off (Voodoo? who were they, eh?) which cannot suffer even a slight change of cable alignment without causing a memory fault. This ensures that only I can use the machine as it is. The factory loaded CD-ROM sounds like it's welding disc to drive while in use, so it was supplemented with a hand-me-down CD burner. Added a 12x12 Wacom tablet with the last of my mad money. Put in a SCSI card soon after to add a 2GB drive for backup OS, as the 14GB factory drive began eating itself as soon as the warranty ran out. By the time the drive shrunk to 8GB, there had been a number of different zip drives installed, as well as multiple 2gig hard drives handed down from a roommate (who also handed down a prototype Sun Microsystems flatscreen monitor... he was very, very good to me) Bought a DVD burner last year (with a sudden windfall of disposable income) and an 80gig drive to replace all the crappy old drives. Had to install an AMA card to get the BIOS to recognize the enhanced thoroughput from the large drive... I've just left the case off for about two years now, as the machine is truly a frankenstinian monster. Named "Hulk". It gets confused easily...

06:50 / 12.09.04

My machine has mutated quite a bit since I first got it. At the core is a 2.5Gz AMD, with a gig of RAM on the motherboard. Added a 256 FX5200 graphics card, filled the PCI slots with a 5.1 Surround sound card, Ethernet card, and various fans for directing airflow. Out went my old CD-ROM, and I now have CD-RW, DVD-ROM, and DVD-RW drives plugged in (the two DVD drives cut down DVD copying time massively). Also have two of those ancient 3 1/4 inch floppy drives we all know and love.
My original 2 gig hard drive has now given way to two hard drives, one 20 gig, the other 160.

09:06 / 12.09.04

I had an old Packard Bell (aka 'The Dried-up Crust of Satans Shit') that I retrofitted with a USB 2.0 card, 10/100 ethernet card, 60Gb Western Digital HDD and a PCI GeForce 4MX. I also added 128Mb of RAM and, once the shoddy drives it came with gave up, I put in a yum-cha DVD drive and an AOpen burner.

Then I got myself a real job, and to celebrate built a system on an ABit IC7-G motherboard with a 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 processor, 1Gb of RAM, 120Gb SATA Western Digital HDD, a 128Mb Radeon 9800 graphics card, 450 Watt ultra-quiet PSU and AOpen DVD drive and burner. All shoved into a Coolermaster Praetorian case with quieter fans running through an Akasa fan controller. It's big, it's black, and it runs Photoshop 7 like a charm (not to mention KotOR, Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3). I'm toying with putting the PCI GeForce 4 card into it as well to restore dual monitor support, and to use the serrilel adapter that came with the motherboard to move the 60Gb HDD I put into the Packard Bell over as a scratch disk for Photoshop.

One gripe is that Windows XP doesn't seem to mesh well with the motherboard's USB 2.0 controller. I've switched it off so I at least have USB 1.1 speeds, but it's irksome all the same. Firewire works, so my external HDD runs well, but I'm hoping that SP2 will allow me to run the USB ports at the intended speed.