My PC is a reasonably fast (or at least, it is now I've fiddled with it a bit) Pentium II. Here are the present specs, and any upgrades I'm planning on making in the short term.
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Current configuration |
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Upgrades planned |
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| Processor |
Intel Pentium II 350 MHz air cooled by a vast heatsink and an old PSU fan. At the moment, it's overclocked to 4x103=412 MHz. It has also been stripped of its casing. |
Same old processor, brand new cooling mechanism. My water cooler is going to be wicked. |
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| RAM |
64 Mb 100 MHz SDRAM. |
Probably the same for the time being, unless it's particularly unstable at high speeds, in which case I'll have to think about replacing it. |
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| Motherboard |
Abit BX6 revision 2. |
No change here, for the time being at any rate. I might solder a resistor and capacitor onto it, to enable me to read the temperature detecting diode that's inside the processor. |
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| Video |
4 Mb AGP STB Velocity 128 with the nVidia reference drivers.
A Nokia 17" Trinitron monitor, presently running at 1280 x 1024 x 16 bit x 85Hz. |
I quite want to get a 32 Mb Ultra TNT 2-based card, but can't afford one at the moment. |
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| Hard disks |
6.4 Gb IBM Ultra ATA, and a very old, semi-reliable, second-hand, rather slow 240 Mb Conner Peripherals device. |
Nothing for the time being. I will need more space some time, but at the moment the need isn't too pressing. I will have to be careful when overclocking; if I use bus speeds other than 100 MHz then the hard disks may get upset, particularly the old one. |
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| Sound |
A SoundBlaster Live! Value connected to my hi-fi, so it's nice and loud. |
The same. It's a lovely card and Creative have taken the friendly step of producing drivers for Linux, so it works in 98, NT and Linux, which is nice. |
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| CD-ROM |
NEC 13-32 speed CAV EIDE. It's fast enough, but bloody noisy, slow to spin up, and can barely manage double speed DAE. |
Nothing for the time being. The 40 speed ones don't offer enough of an advantage. The Kenwood TrueX 52 speed ones look very nice, though, and, more to the point, much quieter than my present drive. I will, in time, get a DVD-RAM drive, but I will wait for decent ones (dual layer capable) to become available. |
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| Comms |
I have been given an old 33.6 Kbs modem, but I don't know if it works yet because (a) I have no 'phone line, and (b) I haven't the faintest idea what all the DIP switches on the back mean. I also have a Realtek RTL 8019 PnP ISA network card. Sometimes I'm connected to a network, but other times I'm not. |
No change. I might get the modem to work, eventually. |
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| Operating system |
It triple-boots between Windows NT 5 Server Beta 2, Windows 98 with MS Plus! (Yeah, I bought it. It has nice screen savers, a nice CD Player, and a virus scanner), and Debian Linux. Windows 98 also has Internet Explorer 5 too. Much of the time Windows 98 is running from within Linux, thanks to VMWare which allows you to run a x86 virtual machine from Linux, and eventually from Windows NT too. This allows me to play with networking and things -- I can have a virtual network within my PC. |
Much the same, though I'll get Windows 2000 Professional (Workstation) when available. |
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| Other Peripherals |
Microsoft Intellimouse 2.0, some keyboard that is nothing special. I am trying to learn the Dvorak layout, as it's faster and more efficient, and will seriously confuse anyone trying to type onto the QWERTY laid out keys, as only the "A" and "M" keys correspond. |
No change here, but I am slightly tempted to get a USB keyboard and mouse, to daisychain them and make my cabling a lot neater. Also, I might get some Dvorak key labels. |
