New Hardware
I've been fighting stability problems with my USB ports (the ABIT KT7-RAID board is notorious for having problems with the onboard USB). So, I popped in an IEEE-1394 firewire and USB PCI board I had laying around, and that seemed to really fix the problem. I also took the opportunity to swap out the twin 30GB IBM drives (running as RAID-1), for a new 200GB 7200RPM UATA Maxtor, since I needed the space to fit all the .CHD files from MAME 0.98 roms. Well, I reinstalled all of Windows XP, and all was good, for about 2 days. Then, I couldn't get it to wake up out of sleep mode one day, and had to reboot. That started all sorts of problems (missing DLL's, and hung boots). I reverted to last known good windows, and that helped a couple times, but I even got a failed post a couple times with BIOS errors.

So, I figured it was time to get rid of the aging KT7-RAID board and AMD 1.1GHz CPU. I had just upgraded Sarah's computer to a new Dell, and had her ABIT KG7-RAID with AMD Athlon 2100 available. Popped that in, reinstalled Windows XP, and things seem to be running just splendidly so far, and I have the power to run some of these newer games.
- posted by Jeff @ 7:24 PM | 0 comments