Over the weekend I took the opportunity to upgrade my PC to make it a bit more energy efficient and quieter. The rubbish generic PSU was replaced by a higher spec branded model and the graphics card was removed, so the on-board GPU would take over instead.

Now, what then went wrong I don’t know. But after this the ethernet refused to work  (sadly its built into the motherboard) and, a few reboots later, I was getting reports of corrupt system files.  And what else might now be failing?

Which has given me the excuse to replace my PC after all these years – it was getting a bit long-in-the-tooth and for a dedicated geek, my insistence of hanging onto Windows XP was looking a bit suspect.

It’s now been ordered, and I’ve ordered some extra goodies as well (I need an HDMI to DVI converter to be able to connect the new PC to my monitor and I’ve also ordered a SATA dock for easily copying my old drive). To keep with the quiet, efficient theme, I’ve order a Dell Zino HD.

Initially, I was looking at the basic model but with an HD and memory upgrade (1TB and 4GB respectively). However, after finding some benchmarks for the 2 available processors, I decided to upgrade this – the basic processor is an AMD 3250e, with a passmark score of 824, compared to the AMD 6850e with a score of 1911.

But, I was curious – they also let you “spec up” a more advanced model, which already many of the upgrades that I was after. As it turned out, £70 more will get you a Blu-Ray drive, 6GB memory, a separate graphics card (rather than the on-board model) and wireless. I can see how Dell manage to get more money out of the customer, as I plumped for this!

It also runs Windows 7 64-bit, so I can now look forward to finding out which hardware doesn’t work with it 😉

As soon as it turns up, expect a thorough review!