Following the recent demise of my nVidia graphics card, my newly adopted, old ATi card was driving me mad. Not only was it's performance akin to a dead snail but it's Linux support is the very reason I upgraded to my nVidia card in the first place.

This was something that needed instant rectification. As far as I could see I had two choices, get a replacement card that's as good or get a better card and upgrade the whole system. Why upgrade the whole system? Well I had a motherboard that only accepted AGP graphics cards. Therefore a better card would require a motherboard that supported PCI-E.

I opted for the upgrade and decided on:
Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13ghz processor
ASUS P5B motherboard
MSI nVidia 7900GTO
Corsair 1GB DDR2-6400

All of which came to around �. The parts were ordered, the delivered, then I spent a day trying to get Ubuntu working on my system before giving up many hours later. So I am typing this from my old friend Windows .

Knowing Linux's sometimes quirky reaction to new hardware I did check everything bar RAM for compatibility. The motherboard was said to be compatible and indeed it is. What I failed to discover until it was too late was the IDE controller and GRUB do not get along well. I can install Ubuntu but can't boot it. I could probably get LILO working instead but to be honest couldn't be bothered after all the trial and error Google suggestions I had tried that day. Annoyed I decided to throw some more money at the problem, I have since ordered a Western Digital 320GB SATA2 hard drive. Since the problem is with IDE drives SATA drives should and have been reported to work fine. A hard drive upgrade was on the upgraded todo list anyway, my current drive is 300GB which is enough for me but is three times slower than a SATA drive.

Whilst upgrading the hard drive I glanced down at the oldest piece of hardware in my boxen. A vintage Creative CD-RW drive with mighty speeds of 12x10x32 which I purchased for �some many years ago and decided it was time to part with this old friend as currently I have no way of reading DVD's as my DVD drive was donated to my MythTV box so I could watch DVD's on it. Since you can get decent DVD-RW drives for a mere pittance, a few pennies shy of �I decided to add a Sony 18xDVD�RW/RAM drive to the basket.

So what didn't I buy? A power supply and a case, that's all that's preventing this upgrade from being an entirely new PC. So far I have gone from running Linux well, to running it not so well to not running it at all! My current expenditure is � which is the most I have ever spent on a PC upgrade in one go (I usually upgrade bit by bit).

The upgrade has been fun now, it's been a few years since I last upgraded and it's been interesting to see prices fall and what novel inventions they have come up with since. Like replacing that awful heatsink clip with a snap and twist mechanism, astonishing. Even fans have come along way. I love silent PC's and opted for a case with 12cm uber quiet fans some years ago. Now these fans are the loudest thing in the case. Both the CPU fan and more surprisingly the GPU fan are whisper quiet! Now other things annoy me like the noise my HD makes and the spin up of my old CD-RW that sounds like a B52 starting up.

The extra parts I have ordered should remedy my two new noisy problems and more importantly I should be back in Linux soon!

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