Time to upgrade / rebuild the PC! Wooo!
Tomorrow I will finally start the first major PC upgrade in 3 years. I figured I should write down some thoughts around this, if for nothing else then at least to keep them for my own reference.
3 years ago I spent a lot of money on building a very powerful system, going with components with a relative specification much higher than I ever had before. To my delight, it has held up surprisingly well, and I've had no reason to upgrade before.
In fact, the main reason I'm upgrading today is because my server is starting to struggle, and I want to use the motherboard, cpu and ram from my old workstation in the server. Of the components, only the ATI 9700 Pro graphics card is starting to show it's age.To me these rebuilds are not only very exciting (I'm like a kid at christmas eve/morning), but they're also very important both to my hobbyist side and to my Professional side.
For years now we've been buying standard HP desktops and laptops at work, which takes a lot of the "hands on" work out of administration and support. This is both a good and a bad thing. On one hand it saves us a lot of management overhead to have standard platforms, and a lot of time to be able to just send something in and let someone else figure out what's wrong and let them fix it.
Unfortunately, as proven time and time again, the world is not perfect. A computer failure (let's say a HDD crash), is always as inconvenient as it can be. And in an economic environment where having equivalent spare laptops on the shelf is not an option, repair times are of extreme importance. To achieve minimum downtime, the most important thing an inhouse IT department can do is make a precise diagnose before contacting the support provider. If you can nail it down properly, you can bring a possible repair time down from a realistic minimum of 3 business days to 1, maybe less.
However, this demands a good understanding of the technologies inside the PCs, both at the logical and technical level - for both hardware and software. And here comes the disadvantage of buying stock PCs - you inevitably lose the direct contact with the technological evolution inside them. Some things "never" change and are just as true as they were 6 years ago. But a lot of stuff do change too. I could sit with my head inside them for some time at work, but there's never enough time, and the benefits of just "browsing" would be minimal.
Since the last time I built a PC, a lot of exciting and more or less revolutionary technologies have made their way to the mainstream desktop computing. To mention but a few:
- Serial ATA
- 64-bit x86 processors (AMD x64 and Intel EMT64)
- Dual Core processors
- PCI-Express
- Windows XP x64 and Windows 2003 x64
In addition, Microsoft has announced that the next verison of Exchange (version 12) will be available for 64 bit platforms only. I'm sure other companies and products will follow suite soon. So if you want to test these things out - you'd better get the hardware and software to run it.
Tomorrow I'll jot down a little details on the system I'm building :)
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