\Computer Resurrected!
It's now been over a year since my desktop first crashed and died. I don't remember exactly when it happened. I had an enlarged fanless heatsink on my northbridge, and then replaced the fans on my NVIDIA 6800 with a huge fanless heatsink as well...but it turned out the video card heatsink was so big it knocked the northbridge heatsink loose.
From there, things just went downhill. The computer became inoperable over time, I think the northbridge got too hot. It sat like this unused until this weekend.
My previous setup consisted of :
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (socket 939)
- 4GB DDR1
- NVIDIA 6800 AGP video card
- 2x 640 GB WD hdds
- DVDrw, and I think I have a floppy drive that's not hooked up
I sold the CPU for $25 on ebay, and my power supply for like $45 and then kept the rest. I don't really have any use for the RAM, so I will probably just find a computer at work that needs some and use it there.
A friend sold me his computer minus hard drive for $90 which included:
- Case
- DVD rw
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (socket AM2)
- Gigabyte motherboard with on-board video and sound etc
- 2x1GB DDR2 800 (upgradable to 16GB)
- Power supply 450W
- fans
I like my case a lot, it's some kind of coolermaster centurion...something like that. So I decided to swap the needed items from the new donor box.
I put in the motherboard/cpu/ram, power supply, and fan. Hooked everything up. Installed my NVIDIA card.
First boot successful! Although my hard drives had some weird errors from a software raid that I had installed that didn't go well a long time ago.
I thought about distros, and although I love Arch I wanted something stable for my desktop, so I decided on a debian/debian-based distro.
Finally decided on Crunchbang.
I set it up with LVM, most of the disk space set up for /home partition (or logical volume...), and put the second HDD as just a large data volume for backup. I decided not to fool with softRAID again, and will just use good ol trusty rsync and cron to get my backups done.
Naturally, everything is running great. So the first thing I had to do was obviously...
Play Minecraft!
I had not been able to since all I have been using were a netbook or nettop, and they just can't handle it. To my extreme dismay, Minecraft actually ran worse than on my nettop!
Not acceptable. Even on the lowest graphical settings it was unplayable.
I had assumed having a separate video card would be better, but apparently I was wrong. I removed the nvidia and used the onboard video and now everything is smoother than it has ever been!
Awesomeness. I don't know if my video card has been damaged, or maybe it has gotten too hot or something. All I know is that I don't need it, and it's old tech anyway.
Now I am up and running, have my ssh keys setup. Heybuddy going. Transmission seeding crunchbang isos, arch isos, and the humblebundle3 game torrents.
So far so good.
It's nice to have a desktop again. :-)
Tags: #compy #crunchbang #linux #resurrect
