This was, for two years, my most powerful computer. The
cpu is a bit behind the curve now, but in every other way, this is a premium
machine. It also has a number of features, that are rarely found on production
machines.
The neatest feature of this machine is the presence of two, removable hard
drive bays. These bays will allow for the addition of any standard 3.5" hard
drive into the machine, without the need to disassemble, or to remove any
of the current drives. Besides adding the bays themselves, I needed to install
a card with an extra set of IDE ports, so that this machine is now capable
of running six IDE devices. With these bays, I can easily add storage, or
even better, I can use them to take images from hard drives, or to reimage
them, using Ghost, or a similar product. I can even use them to set drives
up, or to add, or extract data, using the normal Windows file transfer methods.
This machine has a top quality, Phillips CDRW, a Zip drive,
and a DVD, as well as a 60 gb hard drive. There is a large, 400 watt, power
supply, and a front mounted set of USB ports. There is a full gigabyte of
ram on his machine, making the amount of ram larger than a hard drive of
just a few years ago. I have installed an extra cooling fan in the case,
and have put an extra large fan on the Socket 370 Pentium III CPU. The CPU,
along with the ram, runs at a bus speed of 133 MHz. There are 32 megs of
video ram on the 3D video card installed. The only thing that is not top
end in this machine, is the sound card, which is integrated with the motherboard.
I hate integrated components, but it is getting very difficult to find motherboards
without some degree of this. I will, very likely, disable this feature, and
install a Sounblaster Live, or better.
The operating system is Windows 2000, and I have set the
drive as one large partition, using the NTSF file system. Much as I hate
to admit it, this is a great game machine, though it is a far better graphics
and desktop publishing platform. Photoshop, and Quark just fly on this machine.
The hard drive is large enough for me to put all of my programs, and data
on it, and to do video work, when the urge strikes me. If I ever should decide
that I am a bit cramped on storage space, adding drives will be eased by
the removable bays.
Like all of my machines, this one has been put on my network.
It is a member of my 2000, domain, and accesses the internet through a proxy
server, so that no modem is required. The freed up an IRQ, easing the installation
of the new IDE ports.