Sunday, March 14, 2010

PC Upgrade Finished

Just finished my pc upgrade today!

Sorry I haven't been more active here lately but between work and real world chores I barely have time for myself.
This weekend I finally finished my pc upgrade.

I had some of the parts for a month now and with the help of a borrowed SATA cable I finally finished them. What were the upgrades?
Some hard drives and a power supply.

A few months ago I ordered a new Asus motherboard, AMD Regor 240 and 2 Gigs of GSkill DDR3 Ram.
After I had that installed I decided to go for broke so to speak.
I ordered 2 new Western Digital Black Edition 640 GB hard drives a month after I got the new motherboard, cpu and ram.

Then a few weeks ago I ordered 2 more of the same drives and a new 650 watt power supply. Now my tower is filled to the brim.
The configuration is as follows;
4 - 640 GB W/D Sata drives
2 - Sata Cd/DVD burners
1 - 500 GB W/D Sata hard drive in an external USB enclosure

You may ask why all that space just for Linux?
Good question.
My new system is now a combination personal PC, Local Network server and a Home Theater pc.

During the install of the new parts I added a new 80 mm front and rear fan. Didn't need them before as I was only running a 500 MB Sata and 80 MB Pata drive.
Now that I have four high end hard drives in this system I knew that heat would be an issue. In fact I just checked the drive temps and see that I may have to add in a second front fan and possibly a second rear fan as the drive temps are around 102 F / 39 C

Those temps are a bit too high for my liking.
If I can get them down a few degrees I will be much happier.
Don't want any heat killing the drives as I waited too long for this dream system.

As for the Linux distro I'm running now?
Switched over to the Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit version and so far I haven't had any serious issues. A few minor ones with flash games causing screen flicker in Firefox although I don't have that issue when using Opera.
I'm also using a USB mouse and at times my mouse pointer goes on a rampage and flies to another part of the screen by itself.

But for the most part I'm very happy with the system I now have and hope it lasts a good long while.

Next on my wish list is a big screen tv!
LOL!!!

And I received an older D-Link router from a friend that I plan to upgrade by installing the DD-WRT Linux firmware on it. Will try and keep you updated on that project.

Until later.

TaZMAn

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