Enlarge Your Hard Drive

When I bought my PC in 2001, a 40GB hard drive was a lot.
It was the most I could afford.
It runs at 1.3 ghz, which was really fast in 2001.
It came with a whopping 96MB of RAM.
My very first DIY upgrade was to add 512 MB. It took under five minutes.
Then I replaced the graphics card- three minutes.

I saw huge improvement right away after doing these upgrades- and I learned that PC's aren't really an object at all, they are just a collection of components much like a stereo. Working on a PC reminds me of setting up stereo and PA gear, except instead of doing it in a living room or night club, you have to do it in the space of a shoebox. While grounded.

I do a fair amount of multi-track audio recording using a program which saves every take as a .wav file as default ( this way, you can compare two or more performances and pick the one you want in the mix- for example, the best guitar solo from amongst a dozen or so 'takes'); a single song can have dozens of takes, and broken into it's component tracks a four-minute pop song can easily use an entire gig on it's own before mix-down- let's say that a 4-minute song has 24 tracks - a four-minute song is actually using 96 minutes of space (24 x4 ) .
I was always running out of space and my PC was responding rather poorly- crashes, freezes, sluggish refresh and frame rates etc; I didn't even have enough free space to defrag my drive without backing up a half-dozen CD's worth of data...life was becoming a drag.

I purged every file of spyware, ran scan after obsessive virus scan, defragged-I was still getting crap performance.

So I bought me some gigabytes this weekend. 200 of them, neatly enclosed in a tiny metal rectangular box.
I had to largely deconstruct my PC just to gain access to the drivebay ( difficulty is an HP specialty, most towers are easier)- the drive bay swings out, but you have to remove the fan cover to get to do so- when I removed the cover, I saw why I should clean my PC's innards more often. I used compressed air and blew a visible cloud of dust out of my computer.
Yikes!
Tsk...maybe I'd better just take the whole fan out and clean it...OK, I feel better now...wait!

What's this?

After I removed the main fan assembly and the power supply, I saw a smaller, very dirty fan sitting on top of small square heat sink. It was so clogged with gunk that I am not sure if it even worked. It was blocking my egress to the spare drive bay, so I removed it too - guess what? Underneath all that lint, fuzz and cat dander was my computer's processor. The brainbone, in technical terms.

It looked like my cat had puked a hairball into the mechanism that keeps my CPU cool and left it there to dry for several years. I'm surprised my 'pooter hadn't combusted already, so I used a Q-tip and some anhydrous alcohol to clean the fan and heat sink before I replaced them.

When I put it all back together it booted perfectly, a rare occasion lately.

I fired up Cubase ( my studio program) and recorded a few sample tracks off one of my drum machines...perfect. No crashes, no *pips* and *pops*...yeah! 4 tracks recorded simultaneously without crashing to desktop.

I could get used to this. I've been plagued with tech malfunctions- they are conspicuous in their absence.

I moved a couple programs from my old 3200 rpm (?) Maxtor and onto my squeaky-clean 7200 rpm Seagate ...wow.
It's like having a new PC. I didn't know how badly my PC had been acting until it started running properly again- I thought it was just old.
I think my poor machine was spending more resources on not combusting than it was on my programs.

Now, instead of buying a whole new pooter, I'm gonna just buy me a new motherboard with one of them new-fangled duo-core thingies.

Then I'm gonna get me a fancy-pants video game or two and start calling in sick to work.