Tech Stuff

I blame eBay for it all. I haven't bought much there, only bits and pieces for my computer, a couple of computers and a mobile phone. My most recent purchase is a new CPU for my elderly computer. Well I only won the auction today, still haven't sent any money.

I know I should by a new computer as this one is really old, c. 1999 - 2000), but it just keeps battling on, and recently I've been adding new bits to it. First of all it was the monitor, a nice crisp LCD. A few weeks ago I bought some ram tripling the total from 128 to 384 megabytes. And now I'm going to almost double the processor speed (now this is where it gets really embarrassing) from 500 MHz to 900 MHz. Almost cracking one gig! Due to the clock speeds and multipliers available on my motherboard a select few Celeron and Pentium III CPUs can be used. Even though they lack the extra L2 Cache of the Pentium III I decided to go for a 900MHz Celeron.

I was also going to get a new video card but I soon found out that another shortcoming is that my motherboard doesn't even have an AGP card slot, and that what I thought was an AGP slot is in fact something called an Audio Modem Riser or AMR for short. So much for that, like I was going to be able to play any recent (say last 3 years) games on it anyway. What I have been able to do is buy myself some time before I buy a new PC.

Next on the list is probably a DVD drive. Although I'm not entirely convinced it has enough grunt to burn DVDs let alone play DVD movies (damn video card!)...