TheJANG
12.17.03, 2:04 am
Last night I stopped by the local computer superstore on the way back from work and came home with:
1x ABIT KV7 motherboard
1x AMD Athlon Barton 2800+ CPU
1x 512Mb hunk o' RAM
1x 80Gb HDD
1x Microsoft "Elite" wireless keyboard/mouse combo with leather trim
1x Viewsonic 15" TFT display
1x Asylum BFG 128mb GeForce 5700 Ultra video card
1x aluminum-case 500wt power supply
1x Windows XP Home edition
I've been running a 1Ghz Athlon system with a GeForce 2 since both of these elements were one small step below top-of-the line. When I first built the system, I ran the Win98 upgrade, having owned Win95 with my previous Pentium 400mhz system. I recently upgraded to an old MSDN developer edition of WinXP specifically to be able to install a certain piece of hardware. Over the past few years, my Windows folder and Registry have gotten quite cluttered from installs & uninstalls, and to do a complete clean-slate rework I would have had to go all the way back to Win95 and upgrade my way up. Buying the full version of XP just saves me some sanity.
The new video card has a set of stats that makes my old one shrivel up in a corner. With memory heatsinks all over it and one menacing GPU fan/heatsink, the card uses so much power that you have to connect it directly to the power supply. To think, it wasn't too long ago that I barely had this much system RAM, now it's on the video card alone.
Alright, what does any of this have to do with the title of the thread? I've been building and upgrading my own PC's since 1992 (rare 486DX50, not DX2, with 8megs 30-pin RAM & a 212mb HDD). Never, until this most recent time, has the process been truly effortless. I was able to keep my old case (trick all-aluminum 5-fan early Cooler Master model), as the new motherboard (which includes onboard network & sound) comes with a replacement rear faceplate which snaps into the case and fits the new ports. I even changed out the power supply, to a matching ribbed aluminum 500w powerhouse, without a single issue. Plus, I only had to use a screwdriver four times in total.
In the past, upgrading a motherboard often required tracking down new spacers, going through a long process of lining up holes, picking through different styles of hardware, and using shims to ensure proper card alignment. Over the years I collected several boxes of adapters, gender benders, splitters, drive bay adapters, etc., etc. It's frightening.
The number of cards a motherboard supported used to be an issue, too. After all, at one point there was a need for a HDD controller/multi-I/O board, gfx card, sound card, network card, CD controller card, and god forbid something else to support a unique peripheral. Now, my system has precisely one card -- video. All of the other slots are open. Heck, I didn't even do any research this time around, just went into the store, picked out some stuff, and headed to the checkout line.
BIOS settings used to be very important, and hard drives had to be set up manually by number of cylinders & heads. It used to take a stack of literally about 30 floppy disks to get a system up & running in base form.
Tonight, I fully disassembled my system to a bare case with one old HDD & CD drive and nothing else, and rebuilt it with everything else new, got the OS installed and all accessories running reasonably, oh and I'm connected to the 'Net. It took about 3 hours and one CD.
The industry has really matured! I'm impressed!
PS: The cordless stuff & flat-panel allow me to sit in bed & watch TV with Phuong in the evening, and still get work done during commercials or if I don't particularly care for what we're watching ;) The new video card supports dual monitors natively, so I was actually already in bed before the new hard drive was even formatted!
PPS: Oh, and NTFS, one 80Gb partition! I remember when BIOS limitations didn't allow you to go over 540Mb!
1x ABIT KV7 motherboard
1x AMD Athlon Barton 2800+ CPU
1x 512Mb hunk o' RAM
1x 80Gb HDD
1x Microsoft "Elite" wireless keyboard/mouse combo with leather trim
1x Viewsonic 15" TFT display
1x Asylum BFG 128mb GeForce 5700 Ultra video card
1x aluminum-case 500wt power supply
1x Windows XP Home edition
I've been running a 1Ghz Athlon system with a GeForce 2 since both of these elements were one small step below top-of-the line. When I first built the system, I ran the Win98 upgrade, having owned Win95 with my previous Pentium 400mhz system. I recently upgraded to an old MSDN developer edition of WinXP specifically to be able to install a certain piece of hardware. Over the past few years, my Windows folder and Registry have gotten quite cluttered from installs & uninstalls, and to do a complete clean-slate rework I would have had to go all the way back to Win95 and upgrade my way up. Buying the full version of XP just saves me some sanity.
The new video card has a set of stats that makes my old one shrivel up in a corner. With memory heatsinks all over it and one menacing GPU fan/heatsink, the card uses so much power that you have to connect it directly to the power supply. To think, it wasn't too long ago that I barely had this much system RAM, now it's on the video card alone.
Alright, what does any of this have to do with the title of the thread? I've been building and upgrading my own PC's since 1992 (rare 486DX50, not DX2, with 8megs 30-pin RAM & a 212mb HDD). Never, until this most recent time, has the process been truly effortless. I was able to keep my old case (trick all-aluminum 5-fan early Cooler Master model), as the new motherboard (which includes onboard network & sound) comes with a replacement rear faceplate which snaps into the case and fits the new ports. I even changed out the power supply, to a matching ribbed aluminum 500w powerhouse, without a single issue. Plus, I only had to use a screwdriver four times in total.
In the past, upgrading a motherboard often required tracking down new spacers, going through a long process of lining up holes, picking through different styles of hardware, and using shims to ensure proper card alignment. Over the years I collected several boxes of adapters, gender benders, splitters, drive bay adapters, etc., etc. It's frightening.
The number of cards a motherboard supported used to be an issue, too. After all, at one point there was a need for a HDD controller/multi-I/O board, gfx card, sound card, network card, CD controller card, and god forbid something else to support a unique peripheral. Now, my system has precisely one card -- video. All of the other slots are open. Heck, I didn't even do any research this time around, just went into the store, picked out some stuff, and headed to the checkout line.
BIOS settings used to be very important, and hard drives had to be set up manually by number of cylinders & heads. It used to take a stack of literally about 30 floppy disks to get a system up & running in base form.
Tonight, I fully disassembled my system to a bare case with one old HDD & CD drive and nothing else, and rebuilt it with everything else new, got the OS installed and all accessories running reasonably, oh and I'm connected to the 'Net. It took about 3 hours and one CD.
The industry has really matured! I'm impressed!
PS: The cordless stuff & flat-panel allow me to sit in bed & watch TV with Phuong in the evening, and still get work done during commercials or if I don't particularly care for what we're watching ;) The new video card supports dual monitors natively, so I was actually already in bed before the new hard drive was even formatted!
PPS: Oh, and NTFS, one 80Gb partition! I remember when BIOS limitations didn't allow you to go over 540Mb!