Sunday night we put together the spare parts and made a new PC, a Shuttle XPC, actually. As I explained the other day, it’s made with loose ends, bits of the old MSI-based Windows 2000 system and bargains picked up around town for about $400. For the record, it’s based on an Intel Celeron D chip running at 2.53 GHz, a Western Digital 7,200 rpm SATA-300 hard drive with 250 GB, a Gigabyte (NVidia) 7600GS Silent PCIe video card, one gig of DDR2 400 ram and a Sony dual-sided DVD/CD recording drive.
Fitting everything into the little Shuttle case was pretty easy, though I had to use so much force to get the video card in place that I was afraid the motherboard was going to snap in half — thankfully, it did not. Installing Windows 2000 on the new, blank SATA drive was also a bit of a challenge. I had to boot from Western Digital’s included CD, which required messing with BIOS settings, to partition and format the whole drive successfully. Initially, I partitioned with the Windows 2000 set-up program which could see only 137 GB maximum of the new drive and wasted the rest. Ugly. Once Windows was up and running, there were of course the 50 critical updates that had to be installed. Everything is now working pretty smoothly.
I’ve updated my “tools I use” page and I’ll try to post some comparisons to the prior system soon.
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