I finally, due to my wife's machine dying, got to upgrade my machine. I had been running an Athlon 64 3500 with a geForce 6800 card and 1 GB of RAM. That is now my wife's machine.

I now have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 dual-core CPU, running on an MSI K9N SLI Platinum motherboard. I've got 2 GB of DDR2 RAM. The new video card is an eVGA geForce 7600GT card with 256MB of GDDR3 memory on it. This machine fucking screams! No, it's not the absolute top of the line. But it is insanely fast and I can run most games with full detail @ 1280x1024 (the native res of my monitor).

The actual upgrade process was a fucking nightmare, though. 28 hours of work. First the RAM was DOA. So had to borrow some from my office, no big deal. Ok, so, WinXP didn't like all the hardware changes, so it wouldn't just boot and re-detect like a sane, well-designed, operating system should. Nooooo, it had to fucking keep rebooting right after start of load. Ok, so, have to do a repair install. Buuuut, XP doesn't like the LILO MBR on my drive (for my Slackware Linux dual-boot). So I have to get into recovery console and fix the MBR. Then the repair install finished. Ok! Now it's time to clone my old boot drive (an ATA-133 drive) to the new drive (a much nicer SATA drive). No problem... Just takes forever. Sigh.

Anyway. Was worth it in the end but what a pain in the ass!