Newegg

Just in case anyone had about 5 benjamins to lay down on their favorite blogger, here is my wish list for upgrading my home-built box.

Newegg.com Public Wishlist

I've become obsessed with tweaking out my computer. It's one of the joys I have of being a computer user (the others being WOW and naked ladies.) I can upgrade and mod my hardware components and user-interface at will. Right now, I have a pretty sweet setup at home, with a large 20-inch flatscreen and a smaller 15'' tilted 90 degrees so that it's portrait-oreinted. I should take a picture and post it.

My current specs: (This is from memory, so things may be wrong or incomplete. I could edit them when I get home but that would kind of defeat the purpose of wasting time at work.)

Mobo: Biostar m7viw
CPU: Athlon (1.9 mhz, don't know model)
Ram: 1 gb (2 x 512mb) crucial pc 133 sdram
Video: Nvidia 6800
Audio: Creative x-fi platinum
Scanner: Canoscan L something
Printer: Canon cheap jobber
Storage: 2 x 120gb harddrives
Keyboard: Logitech g15 gaming keyboard
Main display: Samsung 204b
2nd display: Panasonic (it's a tv actually)

This config was mostly built in the summer of 2004 by my brother on a beach. I had been having problems with my previous build spontaneously restarting, sometimes after only 5 minutes. It was getting really annoying, especially since I found myself saving games incessantly to avoid losing my progress. Anyway, after months of me complaining to him, my brother devised a master plan. We were going ot meet our sister camping in CT that weekend and he would bring down a box and I would bring my old system with my hard drives (and all my docs.)

We met at the beach, and he plugged together 3 UPS systems for a total of 15 mins of power. He was able to manually install my hard drive and get it all working before the time limit. I took my box home and was immensely happy that I could play Morrowind and only be worried about the Assassin's Guild. The era of spontaneous restarts were over.

But here it is 2006. I added the video card and the audio card and the dual monitors, and while the machine still runs great, it has started to chug a bit. I did a clean install of windows a month ago, hoping that would help. It didn't really. So I think it's time to upgrade.

I wanted to get better, bigger RAM, hoping that would be the easiest fix. But my mobo is so old that it only supports RAM up to pc266, which is hard to find cheap because noone really makes it anymore. So I have to upgrade my mobo if I want decent ram. And I would need a new CPU because the newer motherboards doesn't support my old one. Complicated, I know, but that's the life of a hacker. I'm always living on the edge of a knife! I'm a rebel Dotty, a loner.

With these 3 components, priced under $500, I can make my system as saavy as one from Alienware or some other high-priced piece of plastic.

Try doing that with a mac, sucka!

Sorry, had to get in the obligatory zang in there.