I was able to replace som major parts of our home desktop. We used to have an AMD Duron 800mhz with “64kb L2 Cache” (overclocked to 1ghz), 8mb Nvidia tnt2 agp video card, 512 mb memory, 160gb HDD. I was able to get a new motherboard (intel chipset), processor (Intel Pentium III 800mhz) and a 256mb ATI Radeon 9600 agp video card.

I was able to reinstall Windows XP without any problems, downloaded drivers for the video card. Was up and running in 2 hours.

Well, I am a bit of a fan of Ubuntu. So I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on the system. Installation went smooth. But when it comes to video card configuration, it was a headache. When I enabled the restricted drivers (closed-source drivers for linux), my monior goes to sleep mode. Tried a few howtos, and failed. Reinstalled Ubuntu to get it clean. It took me almost 3 days (though I’m just working on that for at least 3 hours a day) before I decided to install the drivers that came from ati’s website. And alas, it’s working now.

I was able to configure compiz-fusion (eye-candy of Ubuntu). I haven’t yet checked the 3D rendering on the OS.

Here’s a sample of my desktop with the “cube” effect:

Well, have some things to work on still (TV-out both for XP and Ubuntu). And properly install my Canon Pixma IP1200 printer on Ubuntu (which I think will be impossible, but it’s still worth a try).

With the near end of Windows XP support, and my system not capable of running Vista, and me not having enough budget to buy a new system, I am planning to go to a switch to Ubuntu. Just have to configure the printer and also the desktop to look like XP so my wife could easily adapt to it.