[Morgoth]

Well.. I made my choice. I went for AM2. And for the first time in ages, I'm actually using my PC! Ok, not really my PC now, since only the hard drive and graphics card are the same. I ended up spending more than I meant to out of desperation. I wanted to get the stuff as quickly as possible. But as luck would have it, the telephone line at my house failed! I had to go into my old university to use the internet and make my choice quickly. And nobody had the motherboards I wanted in stock with the AMD 4000+. I went with an AMD x2 4400+ and the biostar t-force AM2+ board from ccl computers, and some 'swissbit' 1gb DDR2 memory..hrm. Ordered it on Tuesday night, arrived today at 10am, so not bad.

I had a horrendous time trying to get the AM2 heatsink on. They seem to require so much force, but I was paranoid about breaking it. Is there any special secret to getting them on or is it just brute force? Also, first time I screwed the motherboard in it ended up squint somehow, despite the case standoffs lining up absolutely perfectly. Didn't help that I hardly have any motherboard screws left.

Anyway once all the stuff was in it powered up first time. I haven't reinstalled windows, but all the drivers are loaded and my PC is sort of back to normal.

I'm happy that so far that it seems like the new processor makes a discernible difference in one regard - I may, depending on finances, be getting a new 10 megapixel DSLR within the near future. I noticed the AMD 64 3200 took a while to open 10 megapixel RAW files that I tested it with. It wasn't unusably slow, just not as good as what I was used to with smaller files. With this new processor, they open much more quickly, which is good.