jeffcraven.com: Upgrade time

Tuesday - August 28, 2007

Upgrade time

This week, I upgraded my PC to a new AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core CPU. That's a pretty decent upgrade from my old 3800+ single core. Now, the actual upgrade was quite easy. I ordered some heatsink cleaner and new Arctic Silver 5 so I could reuse my old heatsink. The new CPU was up and running in less than 15 minutes.

Oh but it can't all be that easy. First, I upgrade my BIOS because the CPU was too new, and didn't fully recognize it. After the upgrade, it reset all my BIOS settings to default which got me into a bit of a mess. When that happened, I didn't catch it quick enough, and it disabled my mirrored RAID array. Windows booted up, and now I had two identical drives. Then I turned the RAID back on, but since Windows had already booted once without it, it screwed up the bootloader. I had to do a repair on Windows. Then after messing around for an hour or so, I finally got the RAID set back up properly and left it to rebuild the mirror. Fast forward to today, and everything is running fine.

I can really see a nice speed boost when doing normal tasks, and it fixed the sound bug I noticed in the new WoW client since I was no longer pegging the CPU at 100%. I think it was a worthwhile upgrade, especially since the price of the 6000+ came down by about $400 since I originally built the PC twelve months ago.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, I left out the fact that I had to call MS to reactivate my copy of Windows. It only took 5-10 minutes, but it just demonstrates how copy protection causes inconvenience to your legitimate customers.

Posted by jcraven at August 28, 2007 10:01 AM