I believe I have officially retired my desktop. My trusty (and severely abused) desktop put together in 1998 1999 (thanks Jeff) has served faithfully. However its 500 MHz processor and slow hard drives finally did it in. Right now I do most of my computing on my laptop, for the simple fact it really is much faster. I tried installing Linux (Kubuntu) on it, but my motherboard (Abit BE6) has a “exotic” UDMA controller by Highpoint, that doesn’t seem to work well. I can only get ATA/33 rather than the full ATA/66, so right now its relegated to powered off (the apartment is definitely a lot quieter with it off).
I think I’m still going to hold off getting a new one till when we move back to CA (I don’t want to put another desktop through a cross country move). I’m not sure if I want to start gutting it (get some external housing for the harddrives). I still need the monitor because it is actually calibrated for my digital imaging/photoshop work. I guess for the near future it will just sit there. I don’t have a closet here that I can stick it and have it serve as a NAS (and it makes too much noise to have it on and not really doing anything).