A nice departure from the recent relationship woes my fellow Shriners are going through.
As I went through my own over a month ago, and am back fully integrated into functionally sane society. I decided to be constructive.
I'd always been intimidated by computers. I'm not a programmer, even the simplest HTML slips from my mind in a matter of days. And the language of the PC world was a confusing mess as well. SDRAM, DDR, SATA or Ultra ATA, IDE, SLI, AGP, PCI or PCI express... etc etc. Wtf does it all mean?
As this was a little daunting, I did some research by checking out local small computer stores, and the Big Box boys. Even with my limited knowledge, I realized that I didn't like what they were trying to sell me for $1,000 (CDN)
A lot of the places threw in a LCD monitor to 'sweeten' the deal. But I get a really good deal from the Samsung NA repair guy here in Waterloo, so that didn't really sell a system to me.
So I took my research to the Net and found a few useful sites. Namely Tom's Hardware Guide, MySuperPC.com and Tigerdirect.ca. I couldn't order from Newegg as I'm in Canada, or it would be listed instead of Tigerdirect.
MySuperPC is awesome. It laid everything a pc noob like myself needs to know. So I then took my budget, $1,500 CDN including taxes and proceeded to find the best deals for what I wanted. That's where TigerDirect came in, and a few other places.
I salvaged my old Case, but tossed the power supply. I also kept my Lite-On CD-RW, floppy and my Monitor.
My shopping list included
CoolMax 450 Watt power supply
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Seagate 200GB SATA hard drive
MSI K8N Neo Platinum 2 MB
Sony DRU710A DVD+/- DL drive (great deal, $99)
Visiontek Xtasy X800 Pro
Corsair RAM 1024 MB DDR 400MHz
Thermaltake Venus 12 CPU fan
Total came out to $1,647 with taxes. Over my goal, but I couldn't pass up the deal on the x800 and I figure I won't have to upgrade it for a long long time.
Putting it together with the instructins from MySuperPC was just so easy. I can't believe I was intimidated by this. I made one wee mistake when setting up my BIOS, but was able to find out what it was and fix it pretty quickly.
In all, after about 6 hours of assembly and OS setup I had a kickass new computer. I am just stoked that I can finally partake in some pc gaming goodness that I've really missed out on. I picked up FarCry and UT2004 to start. I have to admit I really suck at FPS on the PC right now. I'm in the minority that likes the dual analog control from consoles.
Who knows, in the coming weeks I may even take the jump into the addiction that is World of Warcraft.
As I went through my own over a month ago, and am back fully integrated into functionally sane society. I decided to be constructive.
I'd always been intimidated by computers. I'm not a programmer, even the simplest HTML slips from my mind in a matter of days. And the language of the PC world was a confusing mess as well. SDRAM, DDR, SATA or Ultra ATA, IDE, SLI, AGP, PCI or PCI express... etc etc. Wtf does it all mean?
As this was a little daunting, I did some research by checking out local small computer stores, and the Big Box boys. Even with my limited knowledge, I realized that I didn't like what they were trying to sell me for $1,000 (CDN)
A lot of the places threw in a LCD monitor to 'sweeten' the deal. But I get a really good deal from the Samsung NA repair guy here in Waterloo, so that didn't really sell a system to me.
So I took my research to the Net and found a few useful sites. Namely Tom's Hardware Guide, MySuperPC.com and Tigerdirect.ca. I couldn't order from Newegg as I'm in Canada, or it would be listed instead of Tigerdirect.
MySuperPC is awesome. It laid everything a pc noob like myself needs to know. So I then took my budget, $1,500 CDN including taxes and proceeded to find the best deals for what I wanted. That's where TigerDirect came in, and a few other places.
I salvaged my old Case, but tossed the power supply. I also kept my Lite-On CD-RW, floppy and my Monitor.
My shopping list included
CoolMax 450 Watt power supply
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Seagate 200GB SATA hard drive
MSI K8N Neo Platinum 2 MB
Sony DRU710A DVD+/- DL drive (great deal, $99)
Visiontek Xtasy X800 Pro
Corsair RAM 1024 MB DDR 400MHz
Thermaltake Venus 12 CPU fan
Total came out to $1,647 with taxes. Over my goal, but I couldn't pass up the deal on the x800 and I figure I won't have to upgrade it for a long long time.
Putting it together with the instructins from MySuperPC was just so easy. I can't believe I was intimidated by this. I made one wee mistake when setting up my BIOS, but was able to find out what it was and fix it pretty quickly.
In all, after about 6 hours of assembly and OS setup I had a kickass new computer. I am just stoked that I can finally partake in some pc gaming goodness that I've really missed out on. I picked up FarCry and UT2004 to start. I have to admit I really suck at FPS on the PC right now. I'm in the minority that likes the dual analog control from consoles.
Who knows, in the coming weeks I may even take the jump into the addiction that is World of Warcraft.
