In the last three months, I have upgraded my PCs from being Intel duo core CPUs to an Intel 8- core and an AMD 4-core. The Intel chip is working more than twice as good as the AMD chip.
There are an overwhelming number of possibilities when it comes to buying motherboards and CPUs. I bought the Intel first. It worked great as my daily PC. I bought a new mobo and AMD chip for a PC I was going to use as a home theater PC (HTPC) which is a fancier way of saying playing videos from my PC to a big TV screen.
The AMD chip comes with a built-in mid-grade graphics (video) capability. That is AMDs claim to value when selling CPUs to home hobbyists. It never worked as well as desired. I ended up using the Intel as my HTPC which was a serious case of overkill and worked really well.
The AMD PC was sucking when it came to basic websurfing even with an added mid-grade video card. I splurged for an early birthday present buying something a lot closer to the sharp-end of the cutting edge of price/performance curve than I usually do. The graphics card came with two fans and was so big it did not even fit in the mid-size AMD PC case.
I had a really cool graphics card that needed a home. Time to put it in the Intel PC that has a bigger case (ATX vs mini-ATX). That immediately turned into a wrestling match of unexpected proportions. I had to move the harddrives around to make room for the graphics card. Once I got the graphics card installed, the PC would no longer boot.
It turned out that the test install of Windows 8 beta had messed up the boot record on my primary harddrive. The Windows 7 installation disk could not fix the problem on its own. I had to create a Windows 8 install setup on a USB drive to format the drive. I wiped out two partitions and was good to go with Windows 7.
The second partition I wiped out was my data partition. I lost ten days worth of emails, a few of these blog posts, a few other documents of minor importance and a lot of time spent working PCs that I had not planned on doing.
The good news is I bought a different graphics card at the local computer parts store yesterday and it is working much better than the old one on my AMD PC. I still have to complete my Outlook email settings and add a few other programs. Things are at least working in a bare-bones functional sort of way.
I am grateful that PC trouble-shooting issues were my biggest problems this weekend. It was a sort of enjoyable hobby puzzle that I was fortunate enough to have the money to buy a working graphics card and the time & skills to make it all happen.
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