Tom Austin <taustin> wrote:
> Who runs an old PC at home as their main PC.
Me at home and my mom at work


> What are the specs and what changes have you made to keep it usable?
My "main" PC has had quite an interesting life:
It started out as a AMD Athlon XP 2100+ with 512MB RAM, a 160GB Samsung disk and
an Epox EP-8RDA+ mainboard in early 2003
The Processor got overclocked to 2080 MHz with a 180MHz FSB and ran fine for
about 1 1/2 years 24/7 with boinc running. Then it started to have sporadic
errors, so I downclocked it a bit and got myself an Athlon XP 3000+
In the meantime i added a few Harddisks (2x200GB Samsung I wish I had never
bought) and a DVB-S card and used it as PVR (the reaon i hated th Samsung
disks, they coudn't sustain the data rate of multiple streams being read and
written). Some time in 2006 the board capacitors blew up and I had to replace
the board, which wasn't easy. Where in hell did you get a socket A board with a
minimum of 4 PCI slots (3 analog tuner cards and a IDE controller) and AGP in
2006? Luckily I stumbled over a Epox 8RDA6 Pro board in an online shop.
Sometime last year my trusty old nVidia GeForce 4200Ti died on me and i
replaced it with a GF6600GT. This Machine is still running Windows 2000
(probably not much longer, will upgrade to XP) and serves as my PVR and office
computer.

My mom's work computer is a dual processor P-III-650 with a whooping 128MB RAM
(doesn't recognize more in one slot and the second slot is under the CD burner
and not accessible and this mainboard is *huge*) and a 30GB IBM Disk on a
Gigabyte GA-6BXDS mainboard with onboard SCSI.
It started out with only one P-II-550 (couldn't afford more at the time)
I mainly bought it for the onboard SCSI I wanted to have for the Scanner and the
CD-Burner. At the time (1999 or something) the board was cheaper than the SCSI
contoller with the
same adaptec chipset alone.

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