You cannot count the number of times over the years I've kicked myself for building a 32-bit system. In theory, running a Virtualbox instance would be ideal for a lot of the stuff I want to do, but, sadly, I seem to max out on resources far too much.
Need to save some money up and build a more up-to-date system.
oh.. 1 more thing... sadly, it is becomming practically impossible to find any AMD MoBos (and the CPUs that go with them, of course) here anymore :/ Guess The Japanese are more interested in simplicity than building a good reliable system :^(
Not sure what I will do when my current system dies.. can’t afford building a new one anymore :/
I feel for you. I built a new desktop a couple of years ago. It's a eight core I7 (actually 4 core with 2 threads each) with 18G of ram and plenty of disk space. When I built it out, my goal was to have a system that was a 10 year box. The last desktop lasted for about that long before I finally just couldn't take how slow it was relative to new hardware. I don't build on the bleeding edge of the performance curve, but just a little behind it. It cost a lot more than a generic no-name system that is 'good enough' for day to day stuff, but then, I'm looking at the cost as being spread out over 10 years, so it's not nearly so bad.
I have found a very few things that will actually max my box out, but those are very much few and far between. The horsepower available today is astounding. Way back in the day, I used to play with fractals using Fractint. Things that would take literally days to render are now only a matter of a few seconds. Sometimes it is hard to believe how far and fast we've come.