Girija was supposed to be a February 2009 upgrade to Amba, my bittorrent box. I thought, "Why am I still using this Pentium II? I should buy a cheap CPU/mobo/RAM/PSU, throw it in the same case with the same drives, install XP Home that's left over from the Gauri build, and have a modern torrent box that can also run BOINC." Then I found a deal on two used 8800GS graphics cards, which would allow Folding@home to run as well.
So, I bought all of that stuff and immediately ran into a few issues. I didn't really want to wipe my Win2K install, and I wasn't too excited to install XP on the old IDE drive, so I pulled the last 250GB SATA drive out of Durga. I put the new parts in Amba's case, installed XP with the help of the Microsoft automated telephone license lady, and realized that the new PC was really hot. Not only was the case poorly ventilated, but the Corsair PSU seemed really unhappy powering the IDE devices and was running its fan constantly. So, I bought a new case on sale at MicroCenter. Then I realized I had built a brand new PC, so I reassembled Amba using the original parts.
Other than distributed computing, I'm using this box for testing various OS installs. I was running Windows 7 RC on a second partition until it expired, and now I'm planning to install the beta for Windows Home Server "Vail." Mainly, it's nice to have a second PC on my desk with its own monitor, keyboard, and mouse (courtesy of the KVM) to really do some multitasking. I can work (or surf) even when Aparna is rebooting.
Girija means "mountain born" in Sanskrit, and is another name for Parvati, Shiva's consort in Hinduism.