Time to upgrade
Monday, October 27th, 2003 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerWhile my geekiness is legendary, I usually manage to contain my enthusiasm for the newest and best to software and avoid upgrading my hardware as much as I can. Unless you're very well off, buying anything electronic can be a frustrating experience: you rush out and buy the latest, fastest gizmo on the market, only to find that a month later a faster and cheaper one has just been released by a rival manufacturer. That's fine if you have enough money to shrug your shoulders and say, "OK, I'll skip this release cycle and wait for the new VX Powerforce Blaster 128G to come out," but if you blew a month's pay on that white elephant, it can bring tears to your eyes.
This is why for the past five years I've been using a Pentium II, and the only upgrades I made were extra RAM, an optical mouse, an external modem, and a GeForce 2 graphics card (and I only got that after the release of the GeForce 4 brought the price way down). However, the fact that I've been upgrading my software continually (at least on the Linux side - no point in upgrading Windows) means that things have become intolerable. I'm used to going and making coffee when I open OpenOffice, but now I've started going to the toilet when I change tabs in my browser. My 4GB hard disk is never less than 90% full, and that is with regular deletion of anything unnecessary. So it's not time to upgrade the odd component here and there; I need to buy a whole bloody computer.
This puts me in a quandary. I will be spending a large amount of our hard-earned cash, and I don't want to blow it. That's why I'm asking my good geeky LJ friends for some advice.
I'm looking for a system that won't cost me much over $1,000. This is rather depressing, considering that a quick look on CNet has the "mid-range" models weighing in at $2,000, and parts are slightly more expensive over here (e.g. an Athlon XPRequirements:
This is why for the past five years I've been using a Pentium II, and the only upgrades I made were extra RAM, an optical mouse, an external modem, and a GeForce 2 graphics card (and I only got that after the release of the GeForce 4 brought the price way down). However, the fact that I've been upgrading my software continually (at least on the Linux side - no point in upgrading Windows) means that things have become intolerable. I'm used to going and making coffee when I open OpenOffice, but now I've started going to the toilet when I change tabs in my browser. My 4GB hard disk is never less than 90% full, and that is with regular deletion of anything unnecessary. So it's not time to upgrade the odd component here and there; I need to buy a whole bloody computer.
This puts me in a quandary. I will be spending a large amount of our hard-earned cash, and I don't want to blow it. That's why I'm asking my good geeky LJ friends for some advice.
I'm looking for a system that won't cost me much over $1,000. This is rather depressing, considering that a quick look on CNet has the "mid-range" models weighing in at $2,000, and parts are slightly more expensive over here (e.g. an Athlon XPRequirements:
- Linux-compatible
- Win98-compatible, because I still need Windows for games, and there's no way I'm going to buy Windows XP
- able to do video editing, with capture from camcorders
- able to produce good sound and have good responsive MIDI in/out
- needs a nice big monitor area (min. 19") without the monitor being so big it won't fit on my desk (a 19" LCD is probably out of my range)
- needs a graphics pad
- Athlon or Pentium? Should I just wait until 64-bit CPUs become affordable, or is that just wet-dream material?
- Graphic card - nVidia or ATI?
- Any hardware I should avoid like the plague?
