Well, that's that, I got myself a new machine, and my finances lost 600hp (critical hit). Or rather, I dropped 600€ from my wallet while running from Omega Weapon (aka Life-is-a-bitch). Or whatever.
On the positive side, I'm now equipped with a fine-running new AMD Athlon X2 4200, the ASUS M2N-E (nForce570-Ultra chipset) mainboard, a new 250GB HDD, some cheap gfx card (I guess it's some ASUS PCIe card with nvidia chip, I didn't pay too much attention there actually) and 2Gigs of fine DDR800 RAM, which features some funny-looking metal casing. Wow. Now if RAM was actually something you, dunno, actually SEE once in a while, this would be something to brag about with.
(I remember the store had another pair of RAMs from Gskill, which was like "OMG! IT'S BLUE and looks awesome!" and therefore about 10€ more expensive, otherwise technically identical. Yeah, right. What's the problem with looks of INTERIOR hardware today?)
In the end, I decided against an Intel CPU. My old AMD was actually fine and sufficient speedwise, so I figured I could actually rather spend less money on an equal AMD CPU instead of buying a more expensive Intel Core Duo. That slight increase in some applications the Intel offered wasn't worth almost twice the price for me.
Plus, I'm an AMD-sympathizer anyway, so I'm happy with that.
Call me not-state-of-the-art-anymore, but I was quite confused with the new Serial-ATA HDD. While I knew there was something else than IDE/P-ATA by now, I've actually never seen a SATA-device before, not to mention the cables and slots. While it's nice that you no longer have to care about Master or Slave settings with jumpers on the device, since every SATA-device has its own cable, it took me ages to figure that out. Realizing I had no jumpers to adjust took me quite a while, desperately searching for the label on the HDD depicturing the settings guide. Actually, it's plainly obvious, granted, but it's hard to get rid of some thought processes you've been keeping for about since your first 386 computer. It will take me some more time to say bye-bye to IDE devices and the settings you had to apply to them for good. Good riddance to old technical standards and good hard riddance to old habbits.
Funnily enough, it became weird when installing Windows again. Okay, so I know I needed to load up additional drivers for Windows Install to address the SATA-drive correctly, but even then it insisted on putting the bootrecord rather on the Primary IDE Slave (my old HDD) rather than the SATA-HDD, no matter how I arranged the boot-sequence settings in the BIOS, but ah well. I took my several attempts to figure out why the system wouldn't boot with the SATA drive as first instance, since Windows Install actually never asks you where it should put the damn boot record and boot loader. I found no way around that, so I finally went with installing Windows to the IDE HDD.
Would've preferred to have the OS on the new drive as first boot instance, but keeping it on the old drive is fine too I guess (since it's not really old at all, just a couple a' months, but I guess from a technical point of view, being a PATA drive, this already counts as archaic).
For now, it's weekend fun!
Installing software etc. and trying to take my system back to a state of being fully operational for my needs. Good times.