New Computer Shiny!
Apr. 25th, 2007 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jcfialaWe're just going to skip over all the stuff that's been happening with my tooth, okay? It's been long and annoying and painful and root canal and I'm on drugs again, kay? Kay.
Last weekend I put together my first computer from scratch - or at least as much of scratch as you can get with a mail-order catalog. It was a little scary - first I got a book which described the bits you need to take care of, and then I assembled the list of parts that I thought I could afford and would give me a good computer, and then I went out and did a little comparison shopping in-town.
I'm glad I did that shopping - for one thing, the case and speakers are big and heavy enough to negate much of the savings of buying them online with the shipping & Handling, and for another thing I ran into a really smart guy working at the Best Buy who answered a lot of questions for me. Really, really helpful.
Once the pieces arrived I spent some time looking them all over, figuring them out, making sure I knew how to fit them all together... and then on Saturday night I worked on fitting it together. Lots of work. Some frustration. A couple of mistakes... but in the end, I've got a spanking new computer that works so nice... the new graphics card isn't state of the art - state of the art these days only works under Vista, which I wasn't interested in buying. Instead, I've got almost state of the art, and it's wonderous how cool things look in World of Warcraft and in SecondLife nowadays.
And it's totally my computer now. I've put every bit of it together, I know how it works in ways I didn't understand with my older one, and I luv it to bits.
Last weekend I put together my first computer from scratch - or at least as much of scratch as you can get with a mail-order catalog. It was a little scary - first I got a book which described the bits you need to take care of, and then I assembled the list of parts that I thought I could afford and would give me a good computer, and then I went out and did a little comparison shopping in-town.
I'm glad I did that shopping - for one thing, the case and speakers are big and heavy enough to negate much of the savings of buying them online with the shipping & Handling, and for another thing I ran into a really smart guy working at the Best Buy who answered a lot of questions for me. Really, really helpful.
Once the pieces arrived I spent some time looking them all over, figuring them out, making sure I knew how to fit them all together... and then on Saturday night I worked on fitting it together. Lots of work. Some frustration. A couple of mistakes... but in the end, I've got a spanking new computer that works so nice... the new graphics card isn't state of the art - state of the art these days only works under Vista, which I wasn't interested in buying. Instead, I've got almost state of the art, and it's wonderous how cool things look in World of Warcraft and in SecondLife nowadays.
And it's totally my computer now. I've put every bit of it together, I know how it works in ways I didn't understand with my older one, and I luv it to bits.
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Yay!
Date: 2007-04-25 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-25 08:07 pm (UTC)So far I've only bought six prebuilt desktop computers: the PC-XT clone, the 50MHz 486, the Mac II, and three dirt-cheap Windows XT boxes from Fry's, one of which has already croaked. My older daughter has bought one. Then there are the various laptops.
Other than that, they're all homebrew, running Debian GNU/Linux. Most have been upgraded piecemeal, like Grandfather's ax.
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Date: 2007-04-25 08:24 pm (UTC)However, it is a dual boot Windows/Ubuntu, where I'd originally intended it to be a pure Windows machine. But between the size of the hard drive - which was bigger than I thought I'd be getting - and the sudden release of version 7 of Ubuntu - I figured it would be a neat idea to get it set up with dual boot early, before cruft set in.
That said, my old computer is likely to go towards being almost pure Linux - it's still a perfectly decent computer, I just wanted something that was newer.
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Date: 2007-04-26 12:12 am (UTC)Linux boxes make great routers, file servers, and thin clients as well as workstations, but you probably already knew that.
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Date: 2007-04-26 09:05 pm (UTC)There can be an enormous amount of satisfaction in putting something together yourself. Not to mention it can be quite enjoyable.
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Date: 2007-04-26 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-26 11:55 pm (UTC)I thought that I knew you from CMU.
--iain bruhaha