Upgrades

I got a surprise when I turned my computer on in the morning this past Friday.  My graphics card was dead.  I should have picked up on the clues, such as the dead or funky pixels on the monitor (I had thought they where due to the monitor).  Although my computer is 4.5 years old it still is excellent for my purposes.  I do not game so the performance requirements of my PC are simply that the computer runs well and fast.  So I bought a new graphics card and 2 gigs of ram (something I have been meaning to do for a while and this seemed the opportune time).  My old card was a NVIDIA GeForce 7900, it has 256 Megabytes of memory and was OK for most things except CAD.  Since CAD is something I do often I decided to get a better card specifically a EVGA GeForce 9500 GT, which has a gig of memory.  It is only two years newer than my old card but still it is more than sufficient for my needs.

So much fun to pull new computer components out of a box, and knowing that soon your computer will be be much better than it used to be.

My old card (on the right) versus my new card (on the left), I was actually surprised that the new card is so much smaller than the old one.

The 9500 GT in my computer.  It was surprisingly easy to get it working.  All I needed to do was turn on the computer and run the CD that came with the card to install the drivers and I was done.

Time for the RAM.  Here you can see two one gig sticks of RAM, and you can see one of two additional DIM slots (the area inside the black tab between the two white tabs, and behind the farther white tab).

And here are all four sticks in place.  No installation or anything for this step.  This brings the grand total to 4 gigs of ram which is the most Windows XP can use anyways.