Regular readers of this site will know that I am a pretty
big Star Wars geek. But I am also a long
time computer enthusiast. I hardly
would consider myself an expert in computer hardware and certainly not in
computer programming, but I am a very experienced novice user.
A bit of history. I
am a child of the 1980’s. My family
owned their own pharmacy, I still remember when my Mom brought home an old used
PC from the business that became the first computer in our house. It rocked the old 5.25” floppy disks and I
played the heck out of that thing.
“Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?” and “Math Blaster” where on
heavy rotation in that thing. Of course
I also remember using a program at the pharmacy to print out information for a
1st grade report.
I also remember being at a friend’s house the first time I
really saw the Internet in operation, they had Prodigy and it was stunning to
see live updates from the Olympics
appear on their computer. The younger
generation has no idea what it was like connecting to the Internet back in the
day. It is stunning to see how far the
technology has come just in my life time.
Of course we also were rocking the Apple IIE, as early as 6
th
grade I remember having a computer lab class. Let’s be frank, we were still rocking the Apple IIEs among
other obsolete PCs at my High School, so when we got a new PC at home it was
pretty exciting.
Mom brought home a new Gateway 2000. That bad boy clocked in at a stunning Pentium
powered 100 MHZ. I lugged that Gateway
off to college, where I met the dreaded blue screen of death for the first
time. After a fitting period of
mourning, the decision was made to purchase a new computer. I was at college so you can understand the
direction I went with my next PC. Or
should I say, not a PC at all. I bought
into the idea of the more stable, less vulnerable to virus and hipper computer,
I went with an Apple. We get the first
model iBook G3 after they switched from the Clamshell to the more traditional
laptop design.
The iBook served me pretty well in college, aside for some
document format issues different professors using different programs and the
PC/Apple compatibility issues that I ran into as a new Apple user. This little computer began what later began a
pattern of love and hate that I have with laptops. You see I am not the most gentle or careful
person when it comes to my laptops.
Shoved in my back pack with lots of big books, dropped from
my bed during late night last minute paper typing sessions, and typing about as
gently as a inebriated gorilla resulted in some heavy wear and tear on the
iBook. The first thing to go were some
of the keys. Ultimately after about 3
years and countless drops, the power socket and power cord got bent. One fateful day there were some sparks. Lets just say things didn’t end well for my
poor Apple.
After the iBook was
interred, I made the decision to be boring and rejoin the hordes of PC
owners. My next computer was an HP
laptop. You will forgive my lack of
memory as to the model, but to make a
long story short. Too much typing on the
couch and dropping of the computer led to another power port issue and
eventually the computer would no longer get power when plugged in. That is two laptops down due to my clumsiness
so far.
That brings us just about to now. Currently we have two PCs in the house. The one I acquired first was my HP Pavillion
dv6000 with its AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-58 (Tyler processor) and its NVIDA GeForce
7150M/nForce630 graffics card. I
upgraded the RAM from the factory 2 x 1GB DDR2 to 2 x 2GB DDR2 Patriot Memory. The dv6000 is running Windows Vista, which I
don’t really like. Without turning all the fancy Vista graphics off, the PC
runs like a snail. I may be a slow
learner but I did learn from my previous laptop issues and was much more
careful with my care for the HP. But
sure enough once I was out of the warranty period things started to go
wrong. The first thing to go was the
DVD-RW drive. After that it was the
sound card that went. On top of that I
had to send the battery back to HP as part of their battery recall. So armed with a headset with built in sound
card and an exterior optical drive I have a serviceable but aging laptop that
has some performance issues. It tends to
freeze up when I have too much going on and gives off an extreme amount of heat
even with a laptop cooler fan underneath it.
The second PC that we own was part of the dowry that my
darling wife brought into our marital home.
To make a long story short, there were these two shall we say different
characters that worked with my wife.
These two guys were roommates and they both built their own PC’s. Well these guys decided to move from San
Diego and they needed some traveling cash so they sold their PCs to my wife an
another co-worker. The PC my wife’s
co-worker purchased died not long after it was purchased. On my wife’s computer the power supply blew
up and lots of lovely smoke billowed out of the computer. Before we were married my wife dealt with
this PC herself and took it to Fry’s (an electronics retailer and repair store)
to look at it, assess and effect repairs.
Well the Fry’s guy sold her a new power supply for it, got it running,
but the thing still didn’t work right.
This is when I step in with my limited computer hardware
experience. I tear into this thing. The some of cable from the motherboard to the
front of the case are fried and basically reduced to ash. The on board sound is gone. I clean out the burned wires, got it up and
running with a new sound card and for about a year the PC was working pretty
good. Then it starts crashing. Now I have seen the blue screen of death, but
an entirely different blue screen started appearing and the PC began getting
stuck in a boot cycle where windows wouldn’t load. Multiple BIOS updates and re-installations of
Windows later, we have a fairly stable computer that I don’t trust to last too
much longer.
This is where my love of gadgets and technology starts to
give me the itch to get a new computer. It
wasn’t until I started doing my comparison shopping that the idea of building a
PC started to interest me. I originally
was looking at laptops. I am not a heavy
PC gamer, so my desires in looking for a
laptop where pretty simple. Fast processor, lots of memory, a Blu-ray drive,
HDMI output, high definition screen resolution, and preferably USB 3.0. I wanted a laptop that I wouldn’t have to
think about wanting to upgrade for a few years.
The desire for the Blu-ray drive limited my options. I wanted to have a PC where I could watch
movies on if I was traveling and as a back-up in case or Blu-ray player stopped
working or if we were visiting someone without a Blu-ray player we could play
our movies on their TVs.
I wasn’t too impressed with the cost of
models/configurations that had the features that I was looking for. Then the more I thought about it the more I
began to think about how rough I was with my laptops and how it may be better
for me to go with a desktop. I do most
of my website work and typing at the desktop now, and my old laptop is
serviceable enough in a pinch that I really warmed up to the idea of a
desktop. To me the advantage of of desktop over a laptop is the ability to get higher performance for comparable price and the ability to modify and upgrade the desktop more easily. So the more I thought about it, the more the idea of a desktop held some real appeal.
Now I am a person of varied interest, believe it or not Star
Wars isn’t my only interest and Star Wars fandom isn’t my only hobby. As long as I can remember I was fascinated by
technology. I don’t think my Mom has yet
forgiven me for the time I took apart my Casio keyboard because I wanted to see
how it worked on the inside. Let’s just
say that the keyboard didn’t go back together very well and it never played
music again. But even though I was
fascinated by technology, I never really got into studying it, or focused on
engineering like some of my friends.
Even though I never got too deep into the nuts and bolts of technology,
the idea of building a computer was something that I remember thinking about
way back in High School, but not something that I considered because I thought it
was well beyond my knowledge and abilities at the time. I read some PC magazines and went through a
phase were I was watching lots of Tech TV, I have always loved tech but usually
more on the consumer level then on the more nuts and bolts level.
Fast forward to present day and I find myself wanting a fun
project and a new computer and this convergence results in my desire for the
first time in my life to wade from the kiddy side of the geek pool into
slightly deeper water. Check back soon
for the next installment where I describe what kind of PC I want to build and
how I went about initial component selection.
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