Retired Webserver
Background
This is the first computer that I designed and built myself (by designed I mean picked the parts, and by built I mean put the parts together). I ordered all the parts the summer before my sophomore year of college. I already had a laptop for school work, but it was horrible for games, not to mention I am not a big fan of laptops anyway. This computer was put together mainly to play the games that the laptop could not, hence the beefy video card and decent ram (at least at that time).
Putting this computer together was a lot of fun and a learning experience. The workhorse and I definitely had a love / hate relationship. I loved it, it hated me. After assembling it, I had all sorts of IRQ conflicts that caused persistent blue-screens of death. After a about a month of battling this problem, the computer started having problems booting up. After about a week, it would not turn on. Enter the new power supply. It then turned on for about another day. How about a new processor, sure why not. At the end it was a faulty motherboard, the first and only Asus motherboard I have had a problem with. After I replaced the board with a similar Abit board, everything worked. It has been working in that state since then with almost no issues.
*Update* The Abit moatherboard has started having some really strange problems. It will only allow 1 IDE device connected per channel. This means that it is supposed to support 8 devices, but in reality can only support 4. If you connect more than that it will constantly crash. More than that you have to use the bios fail safe defaults. If you change any value, even the time, then windows will crash after anywhere from 1 minute to 8 hours. That sux but for now it is still doing its job as the webserver.
Stats
Hardware
- Abit KG7-Raid motherboard
- AMD Athlon 1600 @ 1400 MHz
- 512 megs of DDR 266 RAM
- Toshiba SD-R5272 8x DVD Burner
- 60 gig 7200 RPM 2mb cache IBM hard drive (I love IBM / Hitachi drives)
- 80 gig 7200 RPM 2mb cache Western Digital hard drive
- 320 gig 7200 RPM 8mb cache Hitachi drive (*new*)
- Antec 400 watt power supply
- Asus v8200 deluxe GeForce 3 video card
- Creative Sound Blaster iLive 5.1 Platinum sound card with front bay controls
- Generic 10/100 network card
Software
- Windows XP Professional
- Various Linux builds on occasion (dual boot)
Uses
This PC has become the new webserver / ftp server / music server / team speak server / and mail server. When its working right I just leave running and never touch it.
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