I received my replacement CPU from AMD on Friday, and spent much of the weekend assembling, testing, configuring and my new primary workstation, which I’ve named “Inara” after the voluptuous “companion” character from the now-defunct science fiction show Firefly. Anyway it took a bit of fiddling to get everything working just right but she’s pretty much all set up now, minus a few tweaks and additions that will happen as the last few parts arrive.

For the geekily-inclined and/or curious, Inara is:

• AMD Athlon XP 2600+ processor with 333 MHz front-side bus;
• ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, featuring the NVIDIA nForce2 SPP chipset, and Silicon Image SiI 3112A Serial ATA controller;
• 1024 MB of DDR RAM, comprised of two 512 MB Corsair XMS PC2700 (333 MHz) CAS latency 2 memory modules;
• 120 GB IBM/Hitachi Deskstar 180GXP 7200 RPM hard disk drive, connected via Serial ATA using a parallel-to-serial ATA adapter;
• Modified eVGA/NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 with 128 MB of DDR memory;
• External FireWire CD-RW drive by QPS;
• Planar Systems 18.1″ LCD flat panel SXGA monitor;
• (etc.)