I'm going to be upgrading a Compaq Presario 7360 here pretty soon. It should be fun to shatter some of the myths surrounding recent Compaqs. It's a standard microATX PC, nothing more, nothing less. With a $20 replacement power supply (Newegg.com calls the form factor used by low-end eMachines, Compaq, HP, and Gateway PCs "mini ATX"), it'll handle any modern microATX motherboard.

I did some power supply swapping this weekend. My video editing PC had outgrown its 300-watt power supply and I needed something fast, so I bought an Antec 430-watt TruePower box locally. I paid $30 too much, and it's definitely a show-off box, with gold plating everywhere and multicolored sheathing around the power cables. I don't care at all about that, but I do care that now my jammed-to-the-gills video editing machine has lots of steady, reliable power. How jammed? It has one PCI slot and one drive bay open. It can suck down some juice.

I've noticed a disturbing trend lately: Everyone who built his own PC knows everything. Just ask him.

I read an editorial at Tom's Hardware Bribe this morning that struck me as a bit unusual. Not only did it not mention Quake once (or Doom or whatever the FPS flavor of the week is today), it didn't mention overclocking, and it wasn't especially excited about AMD and Intel's new CPU releases today.

Well, I was wanting to build a computer last night but those plans got messed up. My shipment from Software and Stuff came in today, but instead of the lovely Socket A mobo I ordered, I got a Socket 7 board. My 1.1 GHz Athlon won't like that very much. So I packaged that right back up. It would be a good board for building a supercheap computer, since it has video built in and Socket 7 CPUs often sell for less than $10, but I want something with a little more punch.

What kind of cheap stuff have I uncovered this week? Socket A microATX mobos are still 20 bucks. For those of you blessed with tower cases, 47-gig full-height 5.25" SCSI hard drives are 20 bucks. If your storage needs are more modest, a 23-gig version is 8 bucks. CD-RW drives are very close to the dollar-per-X mark (32X drives for about $30, 40X drives for about $40, 52X drives for around $50). CRT monitors are dirt cheap because everyone wants flat panels. For that matter, so do I. I guess I need to go find a couple of consulting gigs.

I've been setting up VMWare ESX Server at work, and it's quirky, but I like it. I shut it down improperly once (logging into the console on its Linux-based host OS and doing a shutdown -h now resulted in a system that wouldn't boot anymore) so I'm afraid of what may happen. The upside is since every virtual machine is just a collection of files, disaster recovery is dirt simple: Build a VMWare box, restore those files from backup, point the VMs at them, and you're back in business. No more need to worry about locating identical or close-enough-to-identical hardware. For that reason alone, I'd advocate running all of my Windows servers in production environments on VMWare, since Windows isn't like a real OS that will allow you use a disk or image on dissimilar hardware with minor adjustments. We get some other benefits too, like allowing us to put all the toy servers in one box with RAID to protect us in a disk crash. We've lost far too much to disk failures on desktop PCs recast as someone's pet-project server.

I just built a network for a friend using CompUSA's $30 cable/DSL router/4-port switch. I'm not sure if the price was a Memorial Day special, or if that's the regular price. Considering you can't get a Linksys or D-Link for under $50 without rebate hassles, and usually they cost closer to $80, that's a nice deal.

Last week, I built a Compaq HP Proliant ML570. Quad-CPU, 1.9 GHz Xeon, 2 gigs of RAM, and about 200 gigs' worth of 10K RPM SCSI storage in two RAID arrays.

LinuxWorld posted an article today on how to install another hard disk in Linux. The guide's pretty good from the software side.