Its been a long while since I last purchased an entirely new PC, but today was the day that I finally replaced my trusty old Athlon XP based system.  I have a certain fondness for that computer, possibly because its been with me at every single employer I've had in the IT industry, thats a total of 4 employers over a span of 7 years.  Every single component except for the mainboard, the two hard drives, and the first 512MB of RAM have been replaced in that old system, in fact the power supply and the video card have been replaced twice over the years.  I think the longevity of the system was based largely on the uber reliable Gigabyte GA-7DXR mainboard, the two enormous (for the time) striped (RAID-0) 120GB Western Digital HDD's with 8MB cache, and a reliable install of Windows XP.  Now that I think about it, I can't believe I still have the original Windows install on that machine, especially when I consider the fact that I've had all sorts of beta software installed and uninstalled on that system over the years, and on top of that I've never had any anti-virus software.

Despite it being the longest living PC companion I've ever had, it was time to get a new one.  Things I hate about my old system:

• The system was getting pretty slow especially when running several instances of Visual Studio with Re#.
• The RAID controller never had a formal Windows XP driver, I was still using a Windows 2000 driver.
• No Vista support.
• The system would never power off.  If you tried to shut it down, it would turn off for 4 seconds then immediately power back on.
• The amount of noise from all the fans was absolutely mind numbing and constantly reminded me its cousin was a jet engine.

My new system seems to have fixed ALL of the issues I had with my previous Athlon system it replaced.  I took special care to pick out quiet, yet fast components and it seems to have paid off in a big way.  Not only can I not hear my PC anymore, but the speed is just fantastic.  Here's the Windows Experience Index score: