Thoughts 25 Mar 2008 09:31 pm
New computer
I went to Bestbuy to pick up a power supply and wound up with a Dell XPS 420. Which meant I had to buy a new video card and a new power supply in addition to the psu I was buying to fix my old box.
The basic stats on the 420 were an Intel Q6600 Quad core running at 2.4 with an ATI 2400 video card, 3gig of ddr2 ram, a cd/dvd burner, and a 320gig HD.
Now it has an Nvidia Geforce 9600 gt video card, an additional hd in the form of a WD 10krpm 150gig Raptor and a 650 watt psu.
It also came with Vista home Premium, which meant I had to buy a copy of XP pro for the day when I can’t stand Vista anymore and want to upgrade to XP.
I wanted the new video card because the other is ungodly slow by my standards and I wanted the 10k drive for Photoshop so it could use the slower drive as a scratch drive. I haven’t tested Photoshop yet, but the machine came with Photoshop Elements and I bought a copy of Corel Paint Shop Photo X2 as an upgrade to my X1 for $59.99 and it looks like it will be almost as good as Photoshop for my purposes.
The machine was a display model, since they no longer stock the 420 so it cost me $773 instead of $899 or some such.
It came with no disk, paperwork, or anything other than a dead keyboard, a mouse and a power cord.
It also took an hour or so before I could pick it up because they had to take the Bestbuy software off the drive.
It seems that the software they install resets everything every 30 minutes and prevents the modification of any profiles and so on.
On the whole it seems to be a nice machine, but by the time I was done with parts and software it cost me a little over $1900 to walk out the door.
If I could just learn to buy only what I needed, instead of deciding I wanted something more, I’d have a lot more money. But I’d have a lot fewer toys. –And we all know that whoever dies with………