Old Computer Laid to Rest
The computer my son built for me a couple of years ago was laid to rest today.
It was built from nearly obsolete components when put together, but it was still better than a 400Mhz PII I had been flying on since I can't remember when.
It was a 1.3 Athlon Thunderbird processor, ATI 9800 card (AGP), 1GB of memory, was running XP Pro, had a 233Mhz FSB, and had the usual extras. Still old even when built. I could rarely ever keep it going through a full flight unless all of the settings were turned down except for the aircraft realism.
That computer froze up on me last night and refused to reboot, stopping after the POST check. Something about the BIOS and CMOS having a problem. "F1 to Change BIOS Settings", "F2 to accept errors and continue", except it wouldn't do anything at this point. I changed the battery, jumped the reset pins, did everything but a voodoo ritual with no luck at reviving it.
I stopped at Wally-World today and picked up an E-Machines model with a 2.0 Ghz Celeron Processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160 GB HD, but only a 512MB L2 cashe. That sort of hurt, as I like a large L2 cashe on a machine I may be running FS on, but since it's not the main FS computer it should be OK. I'm going to add a gigabyte of RAM in a couple of weeks and I should be OK. Took all of 30 seconds to make a buying decision since it was cheap and the only model with XP still offered.
I don't know anything about the Celeron processor except that it's a single core, but it doesn't really matter for this system. I might eventually run the engine stack from this computer, but it should be able to handle it fine with the extra gigabyte of memory.
It's much, much faster than the computer that passed away last night.
I guess it'll do. The best part is that it has XP on it and was a tad under three C notes. I'm still working on configuring it, deleting all of the extra crap off of the hard drive, and setting up the Services Menu.
