Friday 30 October 2009

More geekery - a question for those who know.

Looks like I'll need to replace the MoBo, as I mentioned further down. Current OS plans are to stick with XP (as it's really solid until something does the equivalent of putting caltraps across the road).

Now I really dislike the idea of incremental upgrading of PCs because it's so inefficient, cashwise. However there are no cheaper MoBos (nFrorce 6100 chipset or equivalent) with enough RAM slots to just do a straight swap, so I'll HAVE to buy a modern board or go back to 2Mb RAM.

So this then begs the question, is it worth upgrading with a new processor at the same time? The original isn't slow (Athlon II 3800 X2 Windsor) but it was a good low-budget buy 2+ years ago, and things have moved on, particularly in terms of internal bus speeds and cache since then. An AM3 250 should bring a nice speed increase. I guess the question is, would there be an advantage in using a faster processor (multi-core, therefore requiring multi-threading software) running XP and office 2003? The original system (even with a 2 year old build) was certainly competitive against the Macbook (although it's younger it's burdened with a more bloated OS).

In a way it would be nice to grab a board with decent integrated graphics (to cut noise from the fan on the Nvidia 7900 card) quicker processor and slap that in the tiny dell case also laying around for a low-noise, low volume, high efficiency system. At the same time I wonder if I'm just being silly and should grab a cheap MoBo, cut the cost of repair in half and just do the proper full upgrade thing in another 2 years time.

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