Mint Droid

Archive for March 22nd, 2005

Well, this ought to be a lot of fun. I make use of two personal computers. One is a Gateway Select, powered by an Athlon 700MHz processor. This was once my main computer (back when 700MHz was a pretty beefy system), then got demoted to the wife’s computer, and then got re-commissioned as my main Debian PC. It is now basically my main PC again, since I run Debian (Sarge) all the time. It’s not fast, but it doesn’t need to be for what I use it for.

My second PC is a home-built Athlon 2500+ system. I run WinXP on this, and use it as my game machine. Aside from games and Quicken, this machine doesn’t get much use. I have a GeForce 2Ti in this system, a video card I originally had in the Gateway.

Erin bought me Half-Life 2 for Christmas. I played this for a while, but I got tired of the lag and the sometimes-awful framerate, so I put it away in favor of finishing Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Now that I have done that, I decided it was time to upgrade my video card so I can finish Half-Life 2.

I have a 256mb nVidia GeForce 6600 waiting at home for me to install. But since I’m going to have to crack open one of the boxes, I figured I might as well do some other hardware swaps while I am at it. So I am going to make the following changes:

• The Windows box gets the GeForce 6600
• The Debian box gets the GeForce 2Ti
• The Debian box loses its DVD-ROM drive
• The Windows box gets the DVD-ROM drive, but loses its CD-RW drive
• The Debian box then gets the CD-RW drive

The end result is the Debian box will have a faster video card, plus a 48x CD-RW drive for use with K3b. The Windows box will get a kick-ass video card for Half-Life 2, and it will become a full-fledged DVD burning station, as it will now have both a DVD+-RW and a DVD-ROM drive.

I love shuffling hardware!