Sniff... I'd hate to get rid of this :(

Hi Guys,

It's been quite a while since I perused this BBS, but I'm glad to see that things are getting a little bit busier around here! I just thought that I'd let you in on a little dilemma that I had going on. You see, I have this desktop that might be considered ancient by some. Recently, I've really been thinking about a major upgrade involving a new MB/cpu/ram. My problem is that I need more processing power for certain things like physics simulations and media encoding, etc, but I am having trouble justifying the cost that would be involved. Just now, I found out that my fiancee's sister was pestering her parents for a new computer, but she never uses a computer for anything else than surfing the net, chatting on MSN and burning music cd's. So... I was thinking that my computer would be perfect for the syster.

Before I go any further, this is what I've got. Some might laugh, but some might understand why I'm so attached to my dinosaur computer!

-Abit BX6 MB (yeah, the original one, circa 1998)
-Tualatin Celeron 1.2GHz@1.45GHz
-512MB ram
-RADEON 8500, modified a little so that it runs 315 core/300mem
-TV wonder PCI
-SBlive, the original one, with daughter card
-seasonic super tornado 300W silent power supply (it's awesome, and you can't hear a thing)
-Quantum Fireball 30GB + seagate 120GB 8MB cache HDDs
-DVD + CD-R/RW (an old 6X/2X/40X one)
-17" Optiquest monitor. Capable of 1600x1200@75Hz, and 1200X1000@85Hz.
-network card/56K modem.


Last year I thought about getting rid of it completely, but I upgraded the video card instead and I was perfectly happy with it. It runs just about any game fine (I can play warcraft 3, UT2004 without problems). It runs perfectly smooth and is a pleasure to use. The only time that I start getting annoyed is when I use things like Maple/Mathematica and other CPU intensive things.

Amyway, I don't really play games and I don't care for Doom3 so what would you do in my stead? There's two problems:

1) would you feel bad selling this for $500 cdn? Is this too much? Too little

2) I was thinking of upgrading to an athlon64 3000+. This would cost me about $500 for ram/MB/cpu. If I sold everything, I'd have to get a new monitor, video card, everything! It would be quite expensive. The only reason I'd sell my whole system is that it would continue to get good use.

Well that's it! What to do... what to do...

Cheers,

Hugh