More upgrades

All summer I have put up with slow POSTing on my desktop. I was also suffering from lack of RAM. I put off upgrading until after we came back from the UK, and now I've done it.

I decided this time to go for raw speed. Over the years, I've used mostly AMD in my builds, but I've always come up against some incompatibility issues, the latest one being the Scarlett, which I solved in the end.

To switch to Intel, I had to get rid of the motherboard and memory. I opted for an unlocked i7-8700K which was illogically lower priced than the locked version. As I am going for stability, I won't overclock it. I went for a mid-level ASUS ATX motherboard and the fastest DDR4 RAM I could find. I went for 2 8GB sticks, so I have room to upgrade. (There are 2 free slots.)

I fortunately could keep all my drives and PSU, but I discovered that I had no parallel port for my laser printer. I bought one, but it shows up as LPT3. Score won't recognize that, and oddly very little else did. Fortunately, I have a JetDirect port, and it seems to work fine over the network, although for some reason it won't print multiple copies.

I set it up and it is blisteringly fast. The latest versions of iTunes say my graphics card is too slow to play video, and I can't seem to roll back to a version that does, even though Apple says I can.

The last piece of the puzzle was that I was getting a low frequency rumble on my speakers. Since both the Scarlett and the JBL monitors both support balanced cables, I bought some, and now I have crystal clear sound.

Now that I have everything set up properly, I have no complaints (other than the multiple print issue). Re-authorizing Windows was tricky, but somehow I succeeded.