My primary desktop computer at home is now five years old... well, at least the CPU, motherboard are. It's a custom-built system that gets upgraded piece by piece. Anyway, the dual-core AMD processor has really started to show its age during all the photo editing I've been doing. I looked into replacing the CPU/mobo/RAM, but couldn't bring myself to pay the $600 it would cost to buy a new setup that I'd be happy with. It eventually occurred to me that my current motherboard could hold a much faster CPU than I had, so after an $84 eBay purchase, I had a used CPU en route that would (according to the published benchmarks) be three times faster than my old one. Of course, nothing is ever as easy as it should be, and this purchase set in motion a whole slough of problems that required many hours over nearly a week to get resolved.
