The other toy I alluded to last post was an Athlon64 x2 based system. I bought a chip, motherboard, some RAM and a couple of SATA disks.

It was a lot easier to put together than the last machine I built - I remember faffing with a heatsink for an original Athlon 500Mhz chip and almost breaking the board with the amount of force required to get everything to fit. This one all just clipped together and the new case has things which just unclip rather than fifty billion screws.

The graphics card was the hardest to fit but that was because Dabs shipped me the wrong one - an AGP card for a PCI-E slot. They still haven't quite sorted this out for me yet and they don't do phone support any more and seem quite slow at processing their webnote things. Ho hum. Noodles suggested I might have an old PCI graphics card lying around so it's currently using my Matrox Millenium card just fine.

Like the phone, there's a pile of things that need configuring up on it but I have at least managed a Debian amd64 install and given the mirror move have put it on unstable for now. Hopefully soon I'll have it setup to build xfce for me - should be a lot faster than bounce anyway.

Anyway, not much playing for me this weekend; I'm at the beer festival and then partying on Sunday.