Trials, Tribulations and Testing

Well, I have been messing around with the old computers lately. I put a new Athlon XP 3000+ processor in my main system, and I am getting Linux running on another box for use at the college. Hardware changes always introduce unknowns into the system however, and this new processor seems like it might have a few quirks to work out. So far the system has done a few odd little reboots and freezes. Strangely these only occur when I am not here. Stress testing with Doom3 (which gets 3fps better now) shows the chip as running totally stable. I am running the memory and bus at a higher speed (333 and 166) so maybe they don't like this speed, or maybe the processor (which is OEM) is a bit flaky but only on rare occasions? It is hard to say. Initially I thought I had some major troubles until I realized that I'd turned the voltage down on the old 2200+ to keep it cooler. The new processor apparently won't run at anything below default however, and might even need a little extra juice for full stability. It seems to be running between 110F and 120F which isn't bad, but a little warmer than I'd like. Maybe more juice and a bit better heatsink will be necessary.
Of course, the hardware in the Linux box to be is also doing its dead level best to give me trouble. It is an Athlon XP 1600 with an older model motherboard. I think one of the 256mb sticks of ram I had in it was bad because it was doing some crazy stuff until I pulled that (which means the hard-drive isn't bad as I first thought) so I am down to 256mb on that beast. Hopefully that will be enough for running all of the things I hope to run. I might have to get a cheap KM400 chipset motherboard, case, and ram for the xp2200 processor that is now sitting in a bag just so that I have a decent set of hardware for Linux. We'll see.
Meanwhile, I met with Chad Dr. Ayers today (Where was the rest of the research group? Will we ever know?) to discuss the location of our new lab, and get an idea of what Ayers has in mind. I am somewhere between thrilled and excited about all of this, but with O-chem, Physics, lots of lab and computer setup hours, work, and maybe TA'ing staring me in the face like a 5-barrel shotgun, there is a little dread thrown in there. O well, I'll sleep when I'm dead I guess. Ayers did hook me up with the Instructor's Guide for Discovering Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics. Apparently this is the *teachers edition* of a book that the Molecular Bio class will be using this fall. This is the class that I might be TA'ing so having the teacher's edition will be HUGE! Anyway, looks like the Linux install finished successfully, so I best get to evaluating open-source document and project management systems. Yee-haw ;)