It finally happened. What you ask? I'll provide a small hint. This blog is being written on a Dell Desktop P4 @ 1.8GHz with 2GB of RAM running Linux Ubuntu. Good god some body help me! Of the 5 systems I used to have I am now down to a pathetic 2 not including my girlfriend's laptop. Her laptop is one step above this Dell and the remaining system consists of a AMD Athlon Barton 3300 down clocked due to an overheat which damaged the core to 1.74GHz and 3GB of RAM. The HD 1000 Watt monster code named 'Twister' bit it much harder than the previous inconvenience of a mere hard drive failure. The other Western Digital hard drive is still functioning perfectly but now the motherboard has failed. It was not a sudden -hey the thing won't turn on- but a slow painful death. Over the course of the past few months it would 'post' but not pass the memory check until the 4th or 5th reset. Then BIOS failures followed -thank goodness for Gigabyte's Dual Bios- causing reflashes and blue screens of death upon XP boot. Yes yes, I know, an Intel Q6600 is a 64Bit quad core and I should have been on Vista but I have been waiting for Windows7 which, as luck might have it, is set for release next week. Fate as it seems has determined that now is the time for me to start spending some serious cash on new systems. The meteor has fallen, the technological dinosaurs that are my computers have had their run and must now go extinct. Bottom line I need a system capable of playing and rendering HD video for YouTube and burning Blu-Rays.
My options are broad and over the last few days my PC component websites of choice have been the majority of my browsing.
1.Replace the mother board with another Socket 775 board
2.Build a HTPC using the Q6600 and a microATX with ob HDMI leaving remaining parts (graphics etc) towards replacing my obsolete AMD Athlon
3.Build a dirt cheap AMD HTPC and do option 1 to replace my AMD
4.Go hog wild and build a HTPC, two i7's (1366 of course) and a storage system for transfers from my Tivo3HD, say 16TB of storage and replace my aging network infrastructure with a new 24port Netgear switch.
Obviously I'd love to do option 4 and add a laptop but money is finite at the moment. Stats to follow.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)