I have had my computer, in its current incarnation for about 4-5 years now. Through those years I have done little spot upgrades here and there. Maybe a new video card, perhaps a new CPU. For the most part it’s stayed pretty much the same through all of this. I even still have a bunch of the old files I used for shout-casting back when I was with TSN. Well, I am sad to report that the beast has finally died. This really didn’t come as much of a surprise. It had been acting up quite a lot recently. The HDD would sometimes decide it didn’t want to register with the BIOS. The graphics card would decide that it wanted to reset itself at the most in-opportune moments. Overall things were just starting to run slow.
Friday evening was the clincher though. When I came home from work and went to turn on my PC, it came up to the Bios and would go no further. I tried swapping out memory, pulling the CPU, disconnecting the drives. Nothing worked. Ironically enough, just that morning a friend of mine dropped of a Microcenter ad on my desk and I saw a very nice PC that fell into my price range (I had been plotting to buy a new PC for a while now). After my tests I finally gave up and headed out to the store.
Within an hour I had spec’ed out a full system, including monitor, that fell in the price range I had planned on. I even got the full 3 year warrantee on it (covers in home repair). Now I know what some of you might be thinking. Why buy a system like that when you can build it yourself for so much cheaper! Your right, I could have found out what the best motherboard was (from the 8000 current manufacturers) and Checked into the best memory, type and speed, for that motherboard. Then start looking at the 150 different video cards that I could choose from…etc etc etc. And then after all of that I could spend a full weekend Installing and configuring and praying that I don’t run into some sort of compatibility issues. Or, I could spend an hour at Microcenter and get something all ready done and Covered by warrantee so that if a part DOES fry somewhere down the road, I get it replaced. I Build and maintain machines all day at work, Why would I want to do that at home too.
So I now have an awesome computer at home that will last me for the next 3 years at least. I can run all of the latest cool stuff and it looks amazing! And best of all, No quirks (yet)!
So, how about some specs on the new “box”?