Barry’s World

Well, I finally did it.  I’m getting a new computer system.  I’ve had my current system for about five years which is a really long time as far as Personal Computers are concerned.  A lot has changed in the last five years.  The technology has changed so much that my system is a real dinosaur.

Looking back, I think I really made a big mistake by buying the system I have now.  As a Software Developer, I wanted something powerful and able to do some heavy duty number crunching.  Then of course there are always the bragging rights.  In my business, whoever has the latest and greatest in computer hardware is looked upon with some degree of awe by their fellow Programmers.

Five years ago, I purchased a Compaq Evo W6000 Workstation.  The system itself  is great and I’ll probably keep it around for a while as a backup system.  The system came with 512 MB of memory, which was a fairly good amount at the time.  It has been sufficient for just about anything that I’ve needed to do since I’ve had it.  However, over the years many software applications are needing more and more memory.  So a while back, I decided to look into a memory upgrade for my system.  I was expecting the cost to be minimal and would allow me to continue using this system for a while longer.

I was flabergasted to find that the memory for this system had dropped very little in price from when I purchased the system five years ago.  Not only that, but it was extremely hard to find.  The system uses a type of memory called ECC PC-800 Rambus RIMM.  I recently checked a couple of places online where the memory is available and it is running about $150 for a 512 MB chip.  I would like to get my system to at least 2 GB or 4GB if possible.  But as you can see, it would cost me almost as much as a whole new system just to upgrade the memory.  Forget that.

Now to my new system.  It’s a real beauty.  I decided to have it custom built at a local computer store in the town where I live.  Their prices are comparable to NewEgg.com and I believe I got a pretty good deal.  Here is the breakdown of the system.  I went with the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor.  I had initially planned to go with the Core 2 Duo, but recent price decreases convinced me to move up to the Quad processor.

The system will have 4 GB of main memory which should allow me to do just about whatever I need to do.  I had thought about going the 64-bit route and possibly 8 GB of memory, but since I wanted to stay with Windows XP Professional and avoid Vista for a while longer, it wouldn’t have bought me much.  Windows XP Professional can only use the first 3 GB of memory, so going beyond 4 GB wouldn’t do much for me.  Yeah, I could have gone with the 64-bit version of Windows XP, but I’ve heard that a lot of software doesn’t take advantage of that and that some software won’t even run on it.

I went with a Seagate 250 GB SATA II drive.  This should do me for quite a while.  It will also have a Light Scribe DVD/CD drive which I’m looking forward to playing with.  The last major component is the video card.  I looked at several before deciding on the nVidia GeForce 9600 with 512 GB memory.  I’ve always wanted to get into 2D and 3D graphics and Animation and I think this should be a pretty good card to start with.

Finally, I decided to upgrade to a larger monitor.  I had an 18″ LCD monitor a while back, but the thing actually blew up on me.  I had been working on my system and had just walked into another room when I heard a loud pop.  I didn’t have a clue what had happened until I saw that the monitor had gone out.  I thought at first that my screensaver had activated, but then I saw where the top left corner of the monitor was gone.  It had actually blown off.  I’ve never heard of that happening and of course the monitor was out of warranty when it did it.  Oh well, things like this only seem to happen to me.

The monitor I chose is the LG 22″ Flatron wide-screen monitor.  It supports resolutions up to 1,680 x 1,050 which should be enough for just about anything I will ever do with it.  Since the video card will support two monitors, I may use the LG 22″ and the Viewsonic 19″ CRT monitor thats on my old system.

Well, I’m looking forward to picking up my new system tomorrow.  Since I like to keep systems for a long time, technologies will most likely be significantly more advanced by the time I decide to upgrade again.  Who knows?  By the time I get another system, I might be wearing it or something.

Barry