Hiromi isn’t too savvy with the internet or computer so I decided to purchase a little PC for her needs but of course it is masking my needs as well. I need a simple, yet powerful little box to do whatever work I was doing on the net and personal. Being like I am, I couldn’t wait for the internet and the hassle of getting it shipped out here so I just went the the Air Force BX and purchased the best value PC I could find.

I ended up getting an HP a1540n. It comes with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Dual Core, 2 GB of RAM, 250 GB Hard Drive, dual layer DVD writer, and an internal video card that isn’t up to par. I can deal with that because I’ll just upgrade it later via the PCI-Express slot. Other upgrades will include the DDR2 ram to 4 GB. And maybe another hard drive. The sound is good and the hard drive is decent. The first thing to come off was Windows Media Center then the 56K fax modem. I replaced with with my secure version of Windows XP with SP2 and MY modifications. I put XP on half of the hard drive and the other half will go to debian. I am kind of scared because it was such a bitch to get the drivers (the worse one was the AMD Away Mode that was listed as a ACPI device that wouldn’t find it’s drivers automaticly) but after a week of searching and testing, I think I have them all.

So far the computer has performed up to par with what I have done to it. I am now in the process of getting everything off my laptop, the Gateway 7510GX, and putting it on here so this will become my main PC until I build another one. My friend is getting the specs ready for the other box, that one is going to be a power house compared to these. The lappy will be running linux but I am kind of scared due to the fact that there is little support for the wireless card in there, the BroadCom. Funny thing is that MACs use this brand. Gotta find some reverse engineering work for this. I just hope everything does good and no hard drives crash.