Mark:
The irony of the Dell is it's the SO's, and she loves it. The Quantum LM STILL is one of the faster hard drives around, access time wise, and she loves it, for ATA. Don't remind me about the Dell channels only being able to use one device, per channel...
She's getting used to the two monitors, and the P550 is a good balance for what she does with the machine, and, it plays mpegs and should work well for DVD's, if I either hook up an external drive, or, replace the current CD player. The 440BX chipset motherboard works just fine, and has always been fast.
So, in short, even though the ram maybe a little slow, the processor is way behind the other components, that have already been upgraded. Oh, I forgot the new wireless keyboard, and wireless mouse, both have benefited speedwise, from the cpu upgrade.
My hope is this will make the box work for awhile longer, and, I have a very hard time doing cheap computers. I'm sort of jinxed. After all, how many of you have had Gigabyte boards with bad ATA channels????
My Athlon 3000+, that I could give her, and she thinks is really cool, cost around 1500 dollars by the time I got done. 400 of that was scsi.
I really didn't want to spend over 150 dollars, and, at 120, and being a 1.2 ghz, I hope it will be cool enough to last awhile.
I'll save the old processor.
jtr1962: sorry to hear about your's dieing. I think the weak part in the program is maybe the 1.4 ghz is stretching it, heat wise, and, the fans aren't the best.
I've also got the philosophy that the real weak point in all these 'home desktops' are the hard drives. When the Quantum LM heads south, a cheap LSI scsi 320 card, and anyone of the Cheetahs I've got sitting in a box would be a huge speed boost for that machine. Plus, I can transfer it to another machine, later.
However, emotional attachment is a hard thing to deal with sometimes, and, watching her use the machine can be more painful then watching the speed it moves at. I'm sure that you guys might feel that way watching me poke around with computers, but it's odd how people get a proficency level that suits their needs. Hers are AOL, law documents, and little else, except maybe stuff like cat screen savers, etc. I'm not sure if she's figured out how to use the zip drive to back up documents, or, if she's still using floppies, but, that was a major battle. Anyway, this entire event has made it real clear to me that I better come up with a better backup solution.
I had, in theory, the idea of using my two 146 gig 10k's for backing up her data, but, I use nearly the entire drives, burning movies to the disks, viewing, then deleting. I often burn to one, and watch stuff off the other one, or burn off the other one.
OK, I've got to have a look at a solution for the backup stuff...
Thanks all for your help, ande perspective.
Sincerely
Greg
