let's give it up for the new year
well the old desktop PC is starting to go. this one's had quite a run - i built it in 2002 with an Athlon 1.5Ghz, 512MB RAM and a Geforce2MX video card that served me very well. the motherboard is an Asus A7V8X-X was a good buy, pretty cheap at the time, full-featured, but the onboard components have been failing one by one - first the sound, then USB, then the PCI bus... i expect pretty soon the thing won't boot.
most notably is the OS - XP SP2 has been rock-solid, i formatted/reinstalled only once, in 2004, and really only out of an anal-retentive need to reinstall Windows born from the 95/98 days. the install that's been on there since has been running great.
it's seen its' share of power supplies, though - i think i'm on my fifth - it just gets mega-clogged with dust constantly and they end up dying. good thing they're (semi) cheap.
things look so different as i browse pricewatch now... processor models i don't recognize... some newfangled disk technology called serial ATA (i hear it's fast)...
i guess it hasn't been that long since i built a PC - dad and i built my brother's not too long ago... and all i'm doing is replacing the MB/proc/RAM/video card. shoot, i may not even have to reinstall Windows. i may throw in a cheap SATA disk so i can dual boot to ubuntu.
so - some of you have actually touched PC components in the last two/three years - recommendations? does ABIT still stuck? i especially am clueless about modern video cards... browsing through tom's hardware and ars are helpful, but i'd love some personal experience.
i am most certainly putting an ez-bake oven in my PC, though. delicious brownies, covered in dust... mmm....
you can't beat ours. our computer is like 12 years old, for real. honestly, we might have still been in high school when our computer was built.
i think we're running something like windows '91 or something like that.
I think I built that computer for you didn't I Brian?
JW-
I'm with you on the hardware stuff ... I've been out of it for a while. Just have no clue on stuff anymore. I just buy from Dell now ... whether its the proper Geek thing to do or not, I do it.
nod, i'm with you, some of those systems are pretty slick... i would likely go that route if i wasn't just looking to replace a few parts. my hard disks, optical drives, case, network cards, etc. all work fine and so i'm just looking to swap out a few things.
tom's hardware does have a 40-age 2007 processor review... but every proc they discuss costs at least $400. i'm looking to do the whole thing at ~$200...