Number 308 - January 2009

Jumping Into a New Computer
by Neil Longmuir,WPCUSRGRP From Orange County IBM PC UG Newsletter, Dec 2008
I just put together a new computer system. I put an AMD6000 X2 processor on an ASUS M3A78-CM motherboard with 4 gig of RAM, ATI 3100 video card with 256 MB RAM, DVD burner, card reader and two 500 gig SATA hard drives which have 3 gig/sec transfer rates. I also have 3 firewire ports on a PCI card, 12 USB 2.0 ports and 2e-sata ports. I have a 1 Terebyte e-sata drive for putting my photo backups on. I installed Windows XP Pro with SP3 for an operating system. I also put on a new 22 inch Benq monitor which has exctly the same specs as my old 19 inch monitor. So I just set this new monitor up with the same settings as my old 19 inch and both monitors look identical with the same photo on the screen.    I'm just finishing up reinstalling all my software. I have virtually everything up and running. I really don't know why I didn't do this earlier. There is no comparison in speed. The new system just runs circles around the old one.	It took a couple of hours to go out and pick up the hardware and put it in a case. The install of Windows XP Professional took less than a half hour. I actually went away and did some other things and when I came back XP was finished. I then set the machine up for Automatic Update and went to bed. In the morning all updates were done.    The first thing I did was run Mozbackup on my old system and backed up my Firefox and Thunderbird settings. This took about 5 minutes. Then I installed Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozbackup on my new system. Once Firefox, Thuderbird and Mozbackup were installed I did a restore of my FireFox and Thunderbird setting(s) and was up and running in less than 5 minutes.    I then went and reinstalled the bulk of my software on the new system from scratch testing each piece of software as I went along. No hitches at all. I still have to install my Canon flatbed scanner and my Minolta Dimage 5400 slide negative scanner. Everything else is working exactly the same os on my old system. (Recent update: Both scanner drivers were installed and are running fine.)
Number 308 - January 2009