I would like to take a few minutes of your time to properly eulogize a computer that has served me well, but simply passed its time … SAV-DDR.
This computer actually began as a rebuild of a lost machine … a Compaq Athlon 1700 that I bought from a friend for $200 many moons ago that had a bad controller chip on the motherboard. I harvested the memory, hard drive and CPU and threw it into a new board, the nicest available at the time, the MSI Ultra3-ARU, and thus it was born in late 2001. When it was built, it merely had a couple of small hard drives in it (I bet 80 GB max), 256MB of RAM, and just the built in components.
When it died, it had been upgraded to as much as 1.25 GB of RAM (at certain times), almost 900 GB worth of hard drive space, and enough USB2 ports to sink a small army (because the on-board ones got flakey). It served as a formidable grunt computer, and even a very good gaming machine when its upgraded Radeon 8500 was top notch, for five strong years.
Over the past year though, it has become finicky, and the features built into the motherboard (such as built-in RAID), while extremely useful, have outgrown their usefulness. Thus, when I came into a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz computer at work, it has proven to be a suitable replacement.
(This has also turned up the fact that my 160GB hard drive … that I paid $300 for about six and a half years ago, may also be dying. Thank goodness a better replacement is only about $70 now)
So, as of tomorrow, SAV-P424 will be built and off the ground, complete with 1 GB of RAM, likely both of my 300 GB drives, and a small OS drive, and hopefully, nice fast working USB2 ports too. It won’t be as flashy, but it will be a viable replacement for the next year or so, until I can get money saved up to put something nicer together for a centerpiece machine.
