Thursday, March 19, 2009

New PC

After being prompted by this article in Computer Shopper, I decided to upgrade my Dell Dimension 2400. I bought it in December of 2003, so that’s really old by PC standards. I decided to purchase most of the products they recommended, as I’ve been out of the BYO (Build Your Own) market for a few years.

I’m really just replacing my desktop with this PC, but I will use the existing drives and other accessories from the Dimension. So, here are the parts that I purchase (all ordered via Newegg.com)

Case: Cooler Master Elite RC-330
Power Supply: Thermal Master TM-350-PMSR
Motherboard: Asus M2N68AM
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200
RAM: A-DATA 2GB DDR2 SDRAM

They also added a hard drive and a memory card reader, which I didn’t need. I do need to add a number of IDE devices to the PC and this motherboard only has one IDE controller, so that’s two devices and I have two optical drives to add to the system. I also need to add 3-4 IDE hard drives, so I ordered the SYBA SD-ATA133I PCI IDE Ultra Controller Card, which adds two more IDE channels. My boot drive will be an 80GB 2.5” SATA drive that came in my Inspiron 6400 laptop when I bought it in December of 2006.

I will be using MythBuntu as the operating system (at least initially). Not a bad deal for $200.

5 comments:

Sara Quinn said...

I probably would have purchased a different part for the Motherboard but other than that, I think you made good choices!

Anonymous said...

Sara has a good point but I would also change the processor. Hey, who put the build idea in your head? Julian

Eric Schulz said...

I've been thinking about it for a while, but the Computer Shopper article was really the impetus.

Justin said...

Have you tried using Puppy Linux? It's pretty nice, I don't use it extensively, but have a virtual machine on my macbook that i play around with from time to time. And it's free!

Eric Schulz said...

I've got Pupply Linux on an old 233Mhz Pentium Laptop with 128MB of RAM and a 4GB hard drive. It's slow, but usable.