hardware upgrade

on my return from california at the end of july, the 1995 vintage globalyst computer with the p120 cpu (that I'd been nursing for the past few years) couldn't locate the pci bus that controlled its ethernet card. that nic was its only saving grace; when it couldn't handle broadband any more I put it down.

it took about eight hours (spread over two days) to find, acquire and assemble the hardware and load and configure the software that resulted in this new "white box". it retains the same name as the machine it replaced: kolohe (rascal), but its personality is much improved.

i re-used the hard and floppy drives and the cd-rom, kept the external us robotics 28.8 modem (for fax and emergencies) and threw the rest away. i had three sticks of sdram (for a total of 144mb ) that I'd collected over the years in anticipation of this event.

into a new 250 watt genica atx case ($59.99), i put a Vega M6VCF Mainboard  ($69.99) with a 633 Celeron Flip chip ($59.99), a GeForce2 MX 400 AGP video card ($49.99) and a 10/100 Realtek RTL8139 PCI Fast Ethernet NIC ($19.99).

after at $30 discount and adding $9.58 (for the state) the total came to $239.53.

it was the best i could do on such short notice and i'm really very happy with the results. i'm dual booting 98Lite Pro and Mandrake Linux 8.2. both operating systems loaded as if they were designed for this hardware (or perhaps it's the other way around). when i cross paths with a $20 20 gig hard drive i'll add more storage and windows 2000 pro. Apple's Quicktime v6 locked up the microsoft partition until i stripped it off the drive but that's been the only glitch in an otherwise trouble free month of fairly heavy use.

"mahalo nui loa," to the folks at Personal Touch Computers, across the road from compusa. they are the most helpful, knowledgeable and accomodating group of computer savvy sales people in honolulu.

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Sunday, September 08, 2002