My son was more than thrilled when his new video card allowed him to play Skyrim in Ultra High Mode. Exceeded his expectations, he told me. So I got his old one, the Radeon HD 5440 (I'd purchased two a couple years back, one for his sister and one for him). I decided it was time to build a mobile dual-boot box. When I am home, my laptop is always adjacent my desktop. When I am not home, however, I rely solely upon my laptop. It would be nice to have another desktop adjacent it.
Enter Bill's underwhelming 2008 Acer Aspire. I replaced the anemic drive with a 7200rpm and loaded openSUSE on it, stuffing GBZ's old frame buffer in it - a majestic step up from the onboard video. I updated the BIOS, maxed out the RAM at 4GB, and installed Windows 10 on a second hardrive. After careful consideration, I ordered a quad-core Phenom 9750 to replace the dual-core Sempron and an SSD drive for Windows 10. Once I get those last two installed, it should make an adequate small form factor gaming rig and part-time server for my out-of-town excursions.
