Upgrading Old Reliable
Posted by Kirk M on 19 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Life at home
And “Old Reliable” is a 2003 HP Pavilion a645c desktop computer, mid-tower type, 200gb HDD, 512mb ram (not shared!), AMD 3400+, standard DVD drive plus a DVD Burner and a 9 in 1 media reader thrown in just for fun. The display is a 17″ HP flat panel display that came with the original system. I wiped the drive when I first bought it and reloaded it with Windows XP Pro SP2 and currently it’s as updated as MS updates can possibly make it.
It’s running all the .NET frameworks up to and including version 3.3, MS Silverlight (just for grins) and all the latest versions of Java, Flash player, Shockwave, etc etc etc. The browser is the latest version of Firefox, the email client is Thunderbird and it will even run the latest version of Google Earth (the resource hog that it is) without breaking a sweat or even increasing the fan RPM’s.
And it’s Windows Live Writer beta 2 as the main blog writing tool.
Of course there is much to be said about the owner having years of experience in which to draw upon when it comes to keeping his Old PC fine tuned as it were so for having only 512mb of ram and an under powered video card (after market), the thing fairly screams right along . But just over the last week or so there have been several small glitches occurring such as unexplained slowdowns, program crashes and that ever mysterious random reboot that happens for no apparent reason. All the symptoms of a sick power supply that is headed out the door (the hard drive is fine). So…a new 550 watt power supply is on the way from the folks at Tiger Direct to replace the wimpy original one along with another 512mb of RAM of the type made for this machine. What the heck I said–at almost $13.00 for shipping (UPS ground) I might as well get more than one item and let old reliable breath a little easier while I was at it. Besides, the thing has to last at least another year or so since I’m not touching Windows Vista with a ten-foot pole until I see SP1 out for at least four months and some brand new hardware sitting on my desk. And then I’ll still keep this one for other purposes.
There’s an off chance that these various pieces/parts may arrive by the weekend but I’m not holding my breath and in the meantime the machine seems to have settled down and is behaving normally again…at least for the time being. We just did Laurie’s PC (a P4 she put together herself, similar setup) when it started exhibiting the same problems. Worked like a charm. So if all of a sudden I disappear for a bit it simply means the parts arrived and I took the time to clean the insides before I installed the new hardware and I like to take my time.
Hmmm, sure is a long post for such “at home” stuff. But that’s what a personal blog is all about right?
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