A little more than 2 years ago, I traded in my Apple laptop for a desktop PC. I had always been a Mac person, primarily because of my design background. But, as I found myself sliding more into the development side of the web, I also found myself being more productive on a PC. So, I had my good friend Dan put together a box for me, handed over a fistfull of cash, and went to town. Since then, I’ve replaced just about every component that he initially installed - new processor, more ram, new video card, new hard drives, a tv card… Basically, the only original pieces of hardware remaining were the case and motherboard.

Well, over the last month, things have been going downhill. I recently added a drive with SUSE 9.2 Pro on it, and had been dual-booting between that and Windows XP. Three times in the last month, I found myself unable to reboot with reverting to the fail-safe defaults of my BIOS. Which is bad. Finally, on Tuesday of last week, I tried to reboot into SUSE, and got nothing but a single blinking cursor. I spent the next few hours trying to restore the system, and wasn’t even able to boot from a CD. Which is really bad.

Well, to top it off, I had just gotten a call on a project lead, and needed to get some actual work done. I decided that I had spent enough time playing tech support, and bit the bullet on a new system.

As of today, I’m working on a brand spankin’ new AMD-64 system. It’s a Compaq Presario SR1226x. Typically, I would have consulted with Dan before jumping into something like this, but I just didn’t have the time. So, after the fact, I quizzed him on the idea.

Bryan: What’s your opinion on the AMD-64 processors?
Dan: Four thumbs up!…
Bryan: [Link to CompUSA]
Dan: Thats a pretty good deal, too bad it’s a compaq.
Bryan: What’s wrong with the compaq? aside from it being compaq.
Dan: they(and every other big name pc maker) typically use proprietary motherboards that you can’t buy on the market which are /very/ similar to their commercially available siblings, but often just slightly different in terms of bios revisions, chipset versions, etc. it’s not that big a deal anymore, but it used to be a huge problem for linux systems in the past. and they are typically low on memory, power, and pci expansion slots or plugs.
Bryan: That would have been nice to know about 5 hours ago ;)
Dan: [picks up phone]

For the next, oh, 2 weeks I suppose, I’m the cool kid on the block. I remember feeling like this when I plunked down for a G3, and 3 months later they introduced the G4s. And when I got my hands on the Titanium Powerbook, which was updgraded about 2 months later. Or when I got my iPod…

Anyways, it’s a great system. The 64-bit processor is schweet. Microsoft has a free beta version of Windows XP Profession for 64 bit systems, which I downloaded and installed yesterday. Unfortunately, it’s not quite ready for prime time. For the time being, I’ll stick with the standard version of XP. Once I get around to adding another hard drive, I’ll drop the 64-bit version of SUSE 9.2 on. And whenever MS gets around to finishing their version, I’ll upgrade. And wait for Adobe and Macromedia to release 64-bit versions of their stuff…