Two More Years

Posted by Drew458       on 07/27/2010 at 01:08 PM   

1. Easy on, easy off if I make it with wing nuts, and the easel arrangement lets me wash those windows at a comfortable waist height.

   If you can do the precision drilling (and can get the pins), pins and pull rings are even easier, especially with wet, soapy hands. Don’t forget to cable them off to the body of the rack, so they’ll still be where you want them when you’re ready to put them back in.

   Posted by GrumpyOldFart       07/27/2010  at  03:36 PM  



2. That’s Ok Old Cat, nothing to see out there anyway.

   Posted by Drew458       07/27/2010  at  08:49 PM  



3. Always look at a generation back, which in the computer business means as little as a year ago.  The bugs are generally worked out, fixes are in and prices are down.

   ..... paid $350 for my first memory upgrade from 4kb to 16kb in my Radio Shack Model 1 back in the day and when I got my first blazing 4mhz IBM-PC the 10mb hard drive was only a $400 add-on!

   Posted by TimO       07/28/2010  at  07:03 AM  



4. Amazing what 20 years can bring.  My first “real” pc was a 286-12 MHz, 512 Kb RAM, the ST-4096 hard drive, orange monochrome monitor.  Paid $2000 for it in 1990.

   20 years later, I have an i7-920, 6 GB RAM (expandable to 48 GB), two nVidia 9800 video cards, four 160 GB hard drives in RAID 5, housed in a Cooler Master Storm case.  I dished out less than $800 for the whole thing (nice to have an at-cost parts warehouse to shop at).

   Posted by John C       07/28/2010  at  06:50 PM  



5. That’s a lot of bang for not much buck John. Building my own might be the way to go.

   Posted by Drew458       07/28/2010  at  09:34 PM  



6. Drew, if you don’t mind bargain hunting, I upgraded my mobo to a semi future-proof AM2/AM3 mobo, 2GB of DDR2-800 RAM, AMD 5400 Dual Core CPU, a 1GB PCIe 2.0 Video card, AND new power supply for about $250. Figure in a TB of HD, and you are looking at less than $350. Unless you are a power gamer, you don’t need dual video cards or 32GB of PC1066 DDR3 RAM, nor do you need a 4 or 8 core CPU. I play movies in HD with no frame loss on the TV or monitor. It is all name brand, no junk and boots Windoze 7 in 15-25 seconds including the virus scanner.
   It is simple to do yourself, especially as you are handier than the average person. All it is is plugging the parts in the right slots and plugging the plugs in the right plugs, as they can only be plugged one way into corresponding plugs, it’s almost (I will never say completely) foolproof.

   Oh, while PassMark is okay, CPUid is the same thing basically for free. I have been using it for years with no issue. cpuid.com is the site. No malware, spyware or other nasties, I guarantee.

   Just an opinion…
   Bill

   Posted by Doctor DETH       07/30/2010  at  08:38 AM