A couple of months ago I built a new machine. It was a cool experience, since I'd been out of the PC hardware world for so long, focusing instead on software (Longhorn, actually ...). Here are the specs for my new box, all from http://www.directron.com.
- MSI K8N Platinum mobo
- AMD Athlon 64 3500+
- 1GB Corsair RAM
- Seagate 80GB Serial ATA HDD
- Sony 52X IDE CD-ROM
- Sapphire Radeon 9250 video card, AGP8x, 128MB
- Silver AMS gMONO Mid-tower case w/ 300W Athlon power supply
That adds up to a pretty slick system for less then $1000, which surprised me. I ended up adding a CD burn drive, a separate DVD drive, 1 GB more RAM, and a nice M-Audio Audiophile sound card, and a scanner/fax/printer, all of which jacked the price up a bit. But the overall experience, including the system assembly instructions provided by Directron, has been quite good. Okay, so I skimped on the video card, but gaming wasn't a priority. And I bought a cheap case, after which I learned my lesson (the removable drive bay doors will fall out of place if you even accidently touch them from the outside). I subsequently discovered that a brand such as Lian-Li would have been a much better choice, though close to twice the cost for the case. But otherwise, it's all been good stuff.
I built it up to 2GB RAM so I could easily run VMware, which is a cool product, but very RAM intensive. I was even running a pre-WinHEC build of Longhorn within VMware at one point to test smart card features (yes, USB virtualization works) from home.
When I first built the system, the 64-bit version of XP hadn't yet shipped, so I didn't want to mess with it. But last week, I decided to install the RTM version of the 64-bit OS to get some experience with it. It installed without a hitch of course. The only problem that I subsequently discovered is that a 64-bit driver isn't available for my printer (a Canon all-in-one unit). I really don't want to re-install the OS again; maybe I'll buy a new printer! Anyone found a decent home-office printer with 64-bit drivers available?
I did find a Beta version of the 64-bit M-Audio driver that's working, so that's good.
By the way - I tried to work around the printer driver issue by using VMware, but their new Server Beta, which is supposed to support 64-bit Windows, failed to install on my 64-bit XP. That was a major downer, and I need to contact their tech support since I'm guessing it can be made to work.
Since VMware failed, I next tried a recent internal amd64 build of MS Virtual PC. Compared to VMware, I find it to be less intuitive, and the fact that there was no USB support (at least in previous versions) in VPC was lame. But I'm giving it a chance. The Virtual PC experiment hasn't completed yet, so we'll see.
