I just put my previous, well-loved computer in a new case; the computer I had before I built my UUGM (Ultimate Ultimate Gaming Rig) is now officially my pretty-neat spiffy, renewed and refreshed test rig. Anything I really want to play with, try, abuse or install (save for games) will be tried out on Ol’ Reliable aka Test Rig. It’s the system love and some great friends helped build when my 3yr old brick Athlon system died a smokey, sizzle-lean death. And now thanks to a fresh case, 512megs of donated RAM and some sweat, it lives again to boot another day; fulfilling a noble purpose.

As a computer crash test dummy. Hehe. Waste not want not. *giggle*

I pried out the old system with a handy crowbar and pick-axe from it’s 6y old, horrid beige FULL tower and crammed it all into a spiffy $15 black Casecom 10-Bay Mid Tower Case. It’s nice looking, has a clear side, plus a LED light bar running down the front. The sucker doesn’t look bad for being such a cheaply made case. In fact you can routinely find dirt-cheap but good looking under $20 cases online all the time. Which boggles the mind as to why anyone buys $25 cheapie beige cases anymore… *shrug* A funny thing happened the first time I turned my new-lease-on-life test rig on; it on it failed to boot. For about 2 seconds I thought I might have hooked up something wrong until I remembered that New Test Rig aka Old System had that problem; it didn’t always turn on thanks to a short caused on the mobo when I fried a USB header by trying to use a now-I-know proprietary MSI USB hookup. If you look on the mobo you can see the scorch marks as part of it’s electronics melted. But hey, once on the sucker is rock-solid stable… lalala… a perfect candidate to be a test machine! Athlon XP 2200+, 512Mb RAM and a GeForce FX 5200 Ultra Card. One day if I come across an XP 3000+ processor I’ll stick it in.

Anywhoo… long live my new test rig! Woo-hoo me!

BTW, I’ve been a very busy boy playing around with tons of new freeware proggies, XP boot/utility disks and just today at work I found a cool utility to recover XP user account passwords. Woo-hoo me squared!