About My System
My old XP computer died in mid-January 2010 after about 8 years of use -- 12 to 18 hours a day of use. Given our financial situation (huge cancer bills to pay off with no medical insurance coverage), I had to compromise and not buy a high-end system. While I would not normally consider an eMachines system, eMachines ET1331G-03 had a lot of bang for relatively little buck. I finally decided that it was the best deal I could get (or at least get quickly). I'll just have to hope the hardware holds up.
The new eMachines ET1331G-03 has an AMD Athlon II X2 235e dual-core processor running at 2.7GHz with a 2MB L2 cache, 6 gigs of DDR2 memory (expandable to 8), NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE onboard graphics, a 16x DVD writer, and a digital media card reader. The operating system is 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. The weak point in the system is the onboard graphics. However, as I'm not into computer games it will probably do fine -- after all, it's faster and better than the 64 meg GeForce 4 in the defunct old system. If it comes up lacking in the future it has a 16x PCI-E slot. Surprisingly for such a low cost system, it does very well in the Windows Experience Index ratings (7.9 is maximum, 1.0 minimum), except in the graphics department:
Processor: 6.3
Memory (RAM): 7.1
Graphics: 3.5
Gaming Graphics: 3.2
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9
The system came with the 64 bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium. Somewhat to my surprise, I like Windows 7 perhaps even more than I liked XP. I'm very glad I got to skip Vista. Unfortunately, due to driver issues, I can't run Andlinux on the new system: there are no coLinux drivers for 64 bit windows. However, I've found that Ubuntu 9.10 runs great in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The AMD-V and Nested Paging hardware virtualization features of the AMD Athlon II X2 235e chip apparently make for a huge speed improvement. Both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 act like they were each the only system on the box 99% of the time.
Thanks to this new system, I'm excited about Software Gadgets again. I will need to track down new freeware for my own use again: software that takes the best advantage of my new 64 bit processor and of Windows 7. I'll be writing about what I find here on Software Gadgets. I'll probably also post the best Windows 7 tips and Tweaks that I find.
As there was several years worth of posts reflecting my experience on my old XP system, for reference, my old computer was a Compaq Persario 6370US running Windows XP SP2. I had upgraded it to 1 gig of memory from the 512 megs it came with. It had a Pentium 4 single core processor running at 2.5 mhz and an old 64 meg Nvidia GeForce 4 video card. It also had a huge 320 gig hard drive I picked up on sale with some birthday money in 2007, which is now in my wife's box.
