I’ve been spec’ing out a new computer. It’s about time really, the desktop that I’m using was bought before I entered university — 6 years ago. I would have bought one earlier, except I didn’t want to pay the Windows tax, so I was waiting until Vista was released. Now that it has, I’m ramping up my research and deciding what to get.

What I want and what I am going to do with my computer has changed greatly in the last decade. Partly because of where the computer resides in my life and partly due to technological advances. So, this time around, I think my money will be spent on: 1) maxing out the RAM, 2) Supporting dual monitors, and 3) getting a DVD burner. These are, I think, pretty modest requests. I need a DVD burner since I want to backup my shit more efficiently (although I just back it up online now). Chalk maxing out RAM to the fact that I’m more experienced with hardware and the bottlenecks that piss me off. Dual monitors is due to how I use computers now. I have access to so many different machines and what not that my primary computer will now and in the future run services and be a dumb terminal; I’m just going to remote into other systems. So I want my setup to have one monitor devoted to IM/email/etc and my other monitor will be for doing “stuff” (i.e. playing games, surfing, work).

So what don’t I care about? I used to want a modem and not integrated stuff, but I don’t BBS anymore and hardware is such a commondity that I don’t care if components on my mobo breaks. I don’t care about hard drive space at all. The base packages offer more data storage than I can use, since my data requirements grow slowly (I’m not working on video and I don’t keep my TV/movies around). Plus, Ian mentioned that he recently bought half a terabyte of storage for less than $200 bucks, so if I really run into problems later, I’ll just do that and pop it into an enclosure. I’m planning to do that with my old hard drive anyways. Processing power is also not a big deal since I’m going to do a lot of remoting.

I went through the wizard on Dell and priced out a base system with RAM upgrade and a video card upgrade. I was surprised that even the most basic non-integrated video card supports dual displays out of the box. Everything inclusive came to under $1k before taxes for a dual core Athlon, which I think is a very affordable — and I will have an extra 17″ LCD to give my parents. Although, I still have to factor in another $300 for a panel that matches my current one. I tried pricing a similar system through Lenovo using the IBM discounts, but they really weren’t as configurable and the price was basically the same. So looks like my next computer will be a Dell, dude!

I thought briefly about getting a Mac vs PC. It was like a 5 second decision to get a PC. There are some fundamental problems I have with the Mac platform. Maybe it will be fixed in Leopard, but maybe I will leave that rant for another post. Oh yeah, you also can’t compare at all in price for the features that I want.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: computers, geeky, techlust