hello,
i am working on an older ASUS K8N-E series motherboard, with an AMD Athlon 64 2800+ CPU. it is currently operating at 1.8Ghz, with 1.5GB RAM installed. the current, and always used OS on it, is Windows XP Pro edition, 32-bit, with the current SP installed as well. it is running nVidia chipsets for ATA communications, and VIA for IEE 1394. the sound is onboard, and i believe is the famous RealTek AC'97, while the video adapter is a basic PCI based GeForce MX 440.
i am having an issue with this old beast lately. and i do mean beast. its inside one of those nice Antec Grey boxes; i could throw it down a flight of stairs and it wouldnt have a dent on it! :P
anyway, the issue is: it suffers from a near CONSTANT crashing problem. the whole system freezes up, and has to be rebooted. as well, from time to time the Wifi goes out, and it refuses to re-detect the connection, which then forces me to have to reboot. this ususally happens after my bandwidth exceeds a certain speed on the network. i have been wondering, is this bandwidth throttling at all? probably not, but i dont know what that term really means yet.
i am assuming this is a windows related issue, and that it may be time for me to delete my windows system folder, and reinstall windows without a format, as to keep all of my things on the drive. however, i am tempted by x64, since ive never used it, and i certainly should be able to use it.
i like to use this computer for things like flash development, listening to music, watching movies, web surfing, and game emulation (nes, snes, sega, mame, etc.). the basics i suppose.
i guess what id like to ask is, would you foresee any issues with me changing OS's like that? is there a way to simply upgrade XP32 to XP64? could you give me some pointers on drivers to download in advance?
thank you for your time and help!