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20030918 Thursday September 18, 2003

New Desktop? While I'm seriously thinking about a new PowerBook, the more important item on the agenda is refreshing my desktop. It's a P4 1.5 GHz (1 MB RAM) Dell Dimension 8100. I like Windows XP and I love writing Java in it - moreso than any other OS (really!). So I owe it to myself to speed things up a bit on my primary development box. So I went searching on eBay and found I can get a much better machine (almost twice as fast) for only $800. Do you think that's a good deal? I sure do... Posted in General at Sep 18 2003, 08:40:51 PM MDT 1 Comment

Comments:

Things to check. The 256MB of dual channel ram is probably two 128MB sticks, how many open memory slots are there - if its three you are SOOL, buy all new memory. 1GB of DDR 400 dual channel (2 512MB sticks) is currently around $200 if you find a good deal (always buy a matched pair of sticks). Also what size buffer is on the disk drive - the 7200 RPM drives with 8MB buffer substantially outperform the 2M and 512KB buffer drives. We always end up building our high-performance systems - it costs more but you get a substantially higher-performing machine. But $800 certainly looks like a good price.

Posted by Richard on September 19, 2003 at 12:42 PM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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