My PC Gave up the Ghost

I am not a happy bunny. Although my PC (which was damageed by faulty products from www.scan.co.uk ) was on the cards I was hoping it would hold out a little longer or at least until I could get some cash saved up for the hardware that I want.

I would really have liked a dual opteron system but the price is way out of my league at the moment. If you are wondering why I want a faster system its because of my search engine hobby.

The database is several gigabytes in size and growing very rapidly. This means that backups are starting to take a long time to complete due to the lack of grunt in my current XP1700. It takes about 1 hour to gzip the database up, don't ask me about bzip2, I gave up waiting. I also need more grunt when actually trying to create the vector space and get some results back, its fast enough now but this is only for a few thousand documents. I am aiming for the magic one million. Parsing the files is also exceedingly slow (I know I should just do it in C) and more grunt would also help with this.

I am probably going to go for a single AMD64 and hope that it will last for several months before I need more power at which point I may be able to afford a dual system. I am also going to try and do more of the grunt work in C for obvious reasons.