Hey Ski!?

“Here's my delema. I want to upgrade my current system, but I'm hitting a stopping block. I want to upgrade my ram, but my mobo only supports 384 meg of pc100 sdram. I want more then that and I would kind of like it to be a little faster. So, I'm thinking I'm going to ask for a new mobo for christmas. Now here's the delema. My current procesor is an Athlon 500mhz chip. Should I just get a single slot mobo, or try for the double so I can add a faster processor once the 1.7 ghz chips come down in price? Or should I stop my bitching and just accept the 380 as enough and buy a new system in a few years?”

“Well, I did some more looking, and it turns out that my current processor is a Slot A, so there will be no dual chip for me. Next question, Should I just get a socket A board and another processor?”

“Hey, I posted today around 4 PM EDT.

I'm more of an operating system, networking, enterprise sort of guy. I'm not specifically a hardware guy. Perhaps you'd be better off seeking the advice of someone who knows hardware better than I do.

I can understand about wanting a faster processor, but do you really need it? I'd question why you want more RAM than 384 MB. What are you doing with it? Are you running AutoCad or something? Are you running NT4, Windows 2000 or something that you can check your resources when you'ce got programs running? If you can do that, have you checked memory and processor usage?

With prices coming down almost every day, I'd say that if you don't need more RAM or a faster processor...wait. Prices will probably come down again soon.”

“Ski, I am running 2000, and can see that my resources are maxing out. Right now I think it's because I'm flashing so much stuff to the disk. I'm going to go ahead and get one 128 meg chip since the mother board I'm looking at will take both DDR and SDR. It may seem strange, but I do run a heck of a lot of stuff. Our computers at school are all networked, so we end up running all kinds of stuff. I will end up running a server once I get upgraded plus some of the required software is pretty resource demanding.

Since you are an OS guy, what do you know about running Windows in Linux. As in starting in Linux and then opening Windows through that.”

“I don't know Linux very well. More Microsoft NT and 2000. I've also had a bunch of NetWare in my background.”