The War of Attrition Continues

Nope, it's not one of my political rants. Gizmo's motherboard expired today. I was trying to install a Southbridge fan, and must have shorted out the power circuit - the board went dark. I was not able to get it working with any of the various Socket 370 processors I have lying around, so I transferred all the essential bits and pieces to the other case along with my trusty old Asus P2B motherboard. I have one of my 1Ghz PIIIs running in that at the moment (with a slocket). That's a little unstable at a 133Mhz FSB, so it's at 100Mhz. That gives me a 750Mhz PIII, which will have to do for a while. I really should upgrade further, but I don't want to spend too much money at the moment.

I recently built a PC for my brother-in-law for about HK$2600. It was a P4 Celeron 2Ghz with 80Gb disk and 17" monitor. I did donate a few spare parts I had lying around, but the Motherboard (PC Chips M935LU) has quite a lot on board (audio, video, USB 2.0, network) that I didn't need any cards at all. It's not bad, although I think the Celeron P4 is much slower than the Pentium P4. I think that the cache is a lot smaller. This Mobo also takes SDRam as well as DDR, so I was able to save a bit on that.

I might go a similar route when upgrading gizmo/mojo (I have no windows machine at the moment, which is a pain when it comes to scanning: XSane doesn't support my Slide Scanner.