Saturday, Theseus (my computer) died. Just shut off, and wouldn't restart for a couple of hours. When it did come back, the video was screwed up -- various blocks all over the screen where the colors were off. Arrrgh. Time for an upgrade.

I'd been planning to upgrade, but hadn't ordered the parts from Newegg yet. So I had to pick up the parts locally, which cost a bit more and didn't give me a great selection. Naturally, they didn't have a motherboard that would handle my old slow CPU and still give me the option of upgrading. So I went with a decent motherboard with enough PCI slots for me (I've got three soundcards). I upgraded to a relatively fast processor — an Athlon64 3200+ — not top of the line, but performance-wise about twice as fast as my old one. Naturally, my existing PC2100 memory was too slow, so I had to buy a gig stick of PC3400. And a new video card (GeForce 6600 GTOC). Oh, and a new power supply, because naturally my existing one didn't have the right connectors.

And I was happy with that; finally got it working Sunday night. Monday night, after doing my taxes (because my last W2 form finally arrived), I ran Sandra to do some benchmarks on the new system. Yoinks — Mainboard temperature 54°C! 50° is dangerously hot; no wonder the old system died! As much as it hurt, I shut off my neat new system until I could get a better chassis.

I went with an Antec case, because I liked the number of fan mounting points. I also bought a CoolDrive 4, which serves as both a hard drive cooler and a fan speed controller. So despite the fact that I've got a total of ten fans going now, it's no louder than my old case, which had only four.

I also bought some useless eye-candy for the front: a panel with three analog meters displaying soundcard left/right volume levels and hard disk usage. I love blinkenlights. The only way it could be better is if it had Nixie tubes. It actually does have a function: regulating the volume on the soundcard. But since I've got a 5.1 system, it'll only work on two speakers at a time — so if I turn down the front speakers, a stereo sound will still come through at full volume at the rear speakers, since Windows helpfully sends stereo sounds to the rear speakers as well. Of course, I could easily fix that by installing a second one! More blinkenlights!