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I've been doing some hardware upgrades. Here's the short shopping list:

22" Samsung LCD display
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
Asrock 4CoreDual-VSTA motherboard

The old 22" CRT display went bust and I had to get something to replace it. After a short browsing frenzy I went and got the Samsung from downtown, from the only place that actually had it in the shelf, Serv-it. A week or so later, I got annoyed by not being able to play HD-Divx movies. So it was time to look at a budget-friendly computer upgrade. The asrock's motherboard makes it possible to run either ddr or ddr2 memory, it supports both agp and pci-e slots, and takes any goddamn intel socket 775 cpu. Another plus is that it's dirt cheap. See, as far as motherboards go, you can shelf between 50-300 euros on them. This one is at the bottom range. I noticed it too, as soon as I had installed everything. Lots of crashes and freezes. Apparently their hardware support for ATA drives is pretty bad. Luckily it seems most of the problems are gone now that I used the drivers from the CD, and did not use new ones from the web. Strange. The E4300 is running at default clock speed now, I cannot be arsed to fiddle with it since everything is running smooth as it is.

Found a new, very handy image backup application. Acronis True Image 10. Speedy backups possible, easy to run restore (you can either install a boot menu, or run it from usb/cd, cool stuff). It helped quite considerably when my C:\ partition was being raped by the ASS-Rock motherboard. Luckily no important data was lost, but it was not a pleasant experience. I'm not used to fighting shitty hardware. But I'll have to say, now that it's running smooth, all is well.


Eventually I'll make the jump to decent motherboard and buy a monster 8800-gtx series graphic card. And overclock the HELL out of this cpu. But as things are now, I don't want to spend money in more hardware untill I've graduated.