I've made a few more upgrades to my home computers. First, I got fed up with my P4 1.6 in the server and upgraded it with 2nd hand P4 2.8Ghz (800FSB) I got off ebay. The 1.6 would often get pegged at 100% CPU utilisation but the 2.8 is working out much better and the hyperthreading keeps the UI responsive. The lesson is that for an entry level server, at least get hyperthreading. Of course, dual-core is better but I really like that the Northwood 2.8 runs cool using only 69 watts max. If I was building a server today, I'd get a Core 2 Duo.
I needed some new 800Mhz RAM to go in the server so I took the 1Gb from my gaming machine. It was just slow "value " memory. This was a good excuse to get some performance RAM to boost gaming performance. After a bit of research, I settled on 1Gb of Crucial Ballistix. CPU-Z reports the latencies at 2-3-2-8-7. I haven't gone through any overclocking exercises yet but I'll give it a shot at some point.
Soon after I upgraded the server CPU, I started getting Blue Screens Of Death (BSOD) with the error "unmountable_boot_drive". I could fix it with chkdsk but it would soon hang and get another BSOD. SeaTools from Seagate reported quite a few bad sectors so I decided I had better replace the disk rather than bang away trying to work around it.
I now have a Western Digital Caviar 250Mb RAID edition boot drive. I keep my server on much of the time so I've gone for the RAID edition. I now wish all my other disks in the server had been RAID editions or rated for 24x7 operation. I've set the power management settings to power off the hard disks after an 1 hour in the hope that will extend their life in the long run.
After all these upgrades, I've found that I now have enough bits and pieces lying around to build another PC! So I've ordered a new Antec case... :-)