Upgrade Time on the Horizon?
The chief of our company’s IT department totally lost the hard drive on his workstation today. Apparently his computer had been acting up and bluescreening for some time, but since he could always get it to boot he figured it was okay. Now, the drive has done a hard crash and no machine will recognize it. There weren’t any backups, either. Whoops. (Isn’t this state he’s in kind of ironic, given his job title?) So after witnessing that destruction, I spent an ungodly amount of time backing up my entire workstation onto 13 CD-Rs. At least the same fate won’t befall me.
Speaking of computer problems, I’m still on the fence about dropping some cash on my own rig. I’m approaching the two-years-since-last-major-upgrade mark, and I have to say my current rig has held up better than any I’ve owned before it for the same amount of time. It’s not that it’s an underperformer, at this stage, but some of the parts are behind-the-times and, if I’m right about this, I’m experiencing some RAM hiccups. The RAM I put in this machine was of the “budget variety” if you know what I mean, although I had numerous people recommend it to me. But every so often the machine will hang during the memory test at POST time, and every once in a while the whole thing will just freeze up or reboot for no reason (fortunately, this happens only rarely). Under load-intensive games, the crashing is much more pronounced, and in fact kept me from ever completing Half-Life 2 because I couldn’t keep the game running for more than a few minutes at a time.
So, I’m thinking of wiping the slate semi-clean and buying some new core components. A PCI-Express motherboard; a 64-bit AMD CPU; a new gig of RAM that uses better-quality, matched 512 MB modules; a new primary boot hard drive that uses SATA instead of SCSI, and I’m thinking of tossing my old UltraPlex CD-ROM drive so I can ditch the SCSI controller altogether. All of this would likely run me about $600 or so.
I still don’t have any compelling reason to ditch my Radeon 9800 Pro. Yeah, there’s faster video hardware available out there, but I don’t feel like the R9800 is cramping my ability to play games (unless you count the driver headaches), so I think I’ll just wait for something a bit further down the line. The cost of a top-notch graphics card would be about the same as all the other components I just mentioned combined, so that’s another deterring factor.
Lastly, I’m thinking I want to finally jump on the LCD monitor bandwagon. I use an LCD now at the office, and it’s so much easier to read text on it that it isn’t even funny. But I’m going to wait for organic LCD technology to emerge, since it will solve the two problems that are still keeping me away from LCD: Richer blacks due to no need for backlighting, and naturally higher response times for gaming. Again, at first these things are gonna be expensive pieces, especially in the 19”-21” screen size that I’m used to looking at, so it’ll probably be a while.
The only problem with the upgrade plan is that I feel so entirely out of the loop about all this stuff now, I might have trouble making a decision about what to buy. I really haven’t paid attention to hardware for a couple of years. Even worse, prices seem to have gone up since I was last in the market. I heard all kinds of people talk about how awesome the AMD FX-55 processor was, so I went to take a look. Holy nads—it was like 600 bucks for the CPU alone, and there were even better models that were as pricey as $1,000! What is this, 1986 all over again? Sure, I’ll buy that EGA adapter upgrade…FOR A GRAND!
Now that I think about it, one reason that I haven’t thought seriously about upgrading in a while (besides the money) is the fact that most of the new technologies just don’t matter to me, because they’re either too fledgling at this stage (PCI-Express) or cost way too much for me to ever use (AMD FX-55, nVidia’s SLI dual-video card mode). Actually the advancement which I’m most looking forward to is SATA. It can completely eliminate my dependence on both SCSI and EIDE. My current mobo supports SATA, but it’s the older version that doesn’t supply power on the same bus, and I always heard horror stories about the SATA controller on my board causing data loss on hard drives, so I decided to stick with SCSI. Now that there are drives out there (the WD Raptor) that spin as fast as my enterprise-class SCSI disk, but use the SATA bus instead, I can make the switch. I just wish the Raptor came in larger sizes, like upwards of 160 GB. Currently I believe they top out at 73 GB.
Unfortunately, it seems that no matter what kind of upgrade I perform, I am destined to suffer through another superheated PC. I’m going to look at heatpipe or semi-watercooling solutions next time; anything to keep the heat at bay. The other day I was playing a relatively simple game, and saw my CPU was cooking along at a toasty 54° Celcius the whole time. That’s just ridiculous, really. Yeah, I know we keep our house a little warmer than most folks, but gimme a break. At least it returned to its usual idle temp afterwards. The temperature probably ramps up like this on every game I play, but this particular game was running in windowed-mode so I could still see my taskbar and, thus, my thermistor monitor display down there.
Speaking of heat, I think I finally want to replace my four-year-old Lian-Li PC60 case. I need something with more ventilation, like an exhaust fan on top. I also…and I feel pretty embarrased for saying this…would like a case with more “bling.” I’m not into the whole neon tubing, glowing clan logos and color-changing PsychedliScreens that people always have on their cases, but something with a little style would be nice—plus, I’d like an external temperature monitor so I don’t have to run a resident application to keep an eye on it. Given that my current case looks like the Nomad probe, I’m thinking of going with something sleeker, and if possible, black in color.
Hmm…and it’s not just hardware that needs refreshing. I feel like I want to reinstall Windows (since it’s acting a little screwy) and really give my filesystem a good cleaning. It’s been almost two years since my current installation of WinXP was conducted, which is a new personal record. Even my 100 GB hard drive is filling up; there’s only about a combined 10 GB left. But I also feel like it would be a waste of time if I was just gonna install everything back on top of the same old hardware, especially with an upgrade in the pipeline. Right now I also can’t afford to not have an application on-hand or forget where I put the installer for some handy little tool I used to use, not while I have open freelance projects on the line.
I have some cash stuffed away in my secret drawer (left over from my birthday and earlier freelance work payouts) which would get me started on some upgrades, and when all of my current freelance stuff wraps up, I’ll have some nice checks coming in the mail. So perhaps by this summer, I can put something new together. It’s really borne out of the “boys with toys” attitude more than anything else, but there are two material possessions I always like to be proud of—my computer and my car.
And wow. This has been a traditional space-wasting, computer-wanking Oddball Update. (There are several of these in the annuls of Oddball history, in case you were wondering. And no, none of them are worth a second reading either, unless you want to have a giggle over how irreversably geeked I was over buying a 486 DX-2/66.)
Categorized as Computers