As those following along closely already know, we run on our own hardware here at technically.us (and databinder.net), because we can’t be bothered to play by other people’s rules.

This hardware has served us well, but lately it’s been lagging a bit. There’s the twenty minute video of making graffiti that should probably be five minutes shorter. And rebuilding apps and javadocs could always be faster. (Having a MacBook Pro tear through bytecode raises one’s expectations, unfortunately.)

So I figured, what the hell, why not max out this puppy?

The Sempron 3000+ is twice the speed of the CPU I bought with the box, and the end of the line for its Socket A motherboard. It runs at about $50 on eBay, so I emptied the piggy bank and snagged one.

Late Friday night I pulled the plug, swapped the processors, and adjusted the frequency jumper. Everything went perfectly, except that it didn’t boot afterwards. Just the whistling of the fan. The box has no monitor, and no keyboard, so you’re flying blind unless the network interface comes up. Very spooky.

Just as I was unlatching the heat sink to put back in the ol’ procey, I thought maybe I would try another frequency setting.

And she rose! Turns out 166mhz is the right frequency for this processor, contrary to a message on some silly forum I’d hastily searched.

Check back next week when we assemble empty beer cans into a functional robot, using only a glue gun and parts from an Apple IIe.