Computers (General): July 2007 Archives

   I don't have a SCSI CD-ROM lying around. Nor do I have any other means to get things on the 'ole Performa 460. I think I'll have to hook up the floppy drive in the GamingPC. Mind you, floppy drives never seemed to work well in my PCs in the past. There was probably a different reason for that, though. This should work just fine.
   Other than getting the Performa online, the only other thing I needed to do was to upgrade the hard drive. I'm suprised that the original 80MB one is still chugging along, but I can't take any chances. Well, if it fails there really isn't any big loss as I have a complete image of it on my Mac. Still though, I would hate for it to crap out now. That would suck.

   The Radeon X1650 video that I ordered arrived today. I haven't yet played any games on it yet. The difference between it and the previous Radeon 9100 should be quite noticeable, though.
   It may be several weeks until I can get the 1GB DIMM that I need to round-out my GamingPC. All in good time.

   I went down to my parents this weekend for a little rest and relaxation. Plus, I just felt like getting out of my house for a bit.
   I've decided that while I was down here I should work on the problematic Powerbase a little. Well, not so much the computer as it was Seti@home. I've completely removed it from the system and reinstalled it in the hopes of getting somewhere. I can only hope.

   I've decided that getting my GamingPC up to more gaming standards is a priority over buying a new Mac. Right now it is bebopping around with only half a gig of memory and a 'ole Radeon 9100. The Radeon can handle the games as long as you lower the quality a little. What hurts, though, is when the games are forced to start paging the virtual memory on the hard drive. That hurts a whole lot.
   For starters, I'm going to upgrade the video card to a Radeon X1650 Pro. Its a good mid-range card that should be easily able to handle anything I throw its way. They usually run around in the 80 dollar range.
   Next, I'm going to plop a 1GB DIMM in there to really help out on the memory front. Since I have absolutely no plans to upgrade to Windows Vista Resource Hog Edition, 1.5GB of memory should be more than enough.
   Lastly, I'm going to upgrade the hard drive that my Windows installation sits on. It is an older 10GB hard drive that I had laying around at the time. Hard drives are cheap as the hells and shouldn't pose any financial problems for me.
   That's my plans for now. I do hope to eventually upgrade my Mac to something a little younger. The B&W G3 is more than willing to chug along for now, though.