PCs are fun to build

Not much going on recently other than an attempt to rationalise my computer setup. I had an urge to build a PC so I ended up getting some parts to put into a battered but working case I had. A short shopping spree later and I had an Asus motherboard, an AMD Phenom x3 triple core processor, 4gb RAM and a new hard drive, which I cheerfully put into the battered case. A spanner was thrown in the works by the power supply not having SATA connectors so I was unable to use the new hard drive. So I gave in and bought a new shiny case which had a power supply in it. It's a pretty quick machine, even using the onboard graphics chip. At the moment it's running the RC version of Windows 7 which installed without needing any additional drivers, it got them all by itself.

It then dawned on me that I could replace the Dell Precision 450 that has been running as a VMware ESXi server for the past year or so. Because of the hassle of shutting down the four or five virtual machines that it constantly ran, I tended to leave it on all the time, not ideal as it's quite a big power hungry machine. I ended up getting another case and installing an ASRock Atom motherboard. The Atom is more commonly seen in netbooks but this motherboard has the dual-core Atom 330. Due to funds running low I had to put 2gb of the RAM from the Phenom into it and used a spare 120gb laptop SATA hard drive to get it up and running. At first it didn't look like ESXi was going to like the Atom as it kept dying with the PSoD (Purple Screen of Death) as soon as there was anything running with any load. Uncertain as to the cause, I tried turning off Hyperthreading in the BIOS and it's been stable ever since. It's currently running a single FreeNAS VM with a wodge of disk space as a network store.

The plan now is to get some faster RAM for the Phenom motherboard, and transfer the remaining 2gb to the Atom board. Then get a better power supply and a proper graphics card for the Phenom and a network card for the Atom that will let it run ESXi 4 which is 64-bit, and perhaps a bigger hard drive.