Posted 12:32 PM by Gene

One reason I've taken time off from blogging (The World Savers of Mountain View notwithstanding) is I've been busy melting my head down figuring when or if I should buy a new computer. My five year old Lenny is perfectly adequate but Firefox and the BUGMEISTERS' Media Player give it seizures; I fear though Windows 7 is merely quirky in a different way, and that 6 or 12 or 24 gigs of memory will be so busily churning away they won't be better than the two in my current box. HP and some eBay seller are having sales on "refurbished" computers (on some models the latter's throwing in Windows 7 Ultimate!) but as I said before I want the ability to expand, however little I may use it, and the I7-900 series Pavilion Elite models come with only four SATA ports, despite having room for six drives (the space for one was taken by the largely useless USB Portable Media Drive, now discontinued, its cubbyhole walled off by a bracket); to complicate things (sorry for this boring exposition) HP has introduced a new model, the HPE-270F, with space for three hard drives; the problem is to get the third in they discontinued the largely useless USB Pocket Media Drive, and meantime the motherboard (the notorious Pegatron Truckee, blamed for all sorts of madness with earlier models) apparently has the same four SATA ports; you must choose between a hard drive and an optical drive. I don't like that kind of choice. I've spent a day gnashing my head realizing you can't jerry-rig a SATA port from a USB port. (Don't bother with HP's site; the installation instructions are from a discontinued model.) Given the motherboard three months' warranty is not reassuring. And Dell keeps a second graphics card off its putative high-end model (I am NOT buying one of those dorky overpriced Alienware robots), and the supreme golfer-CEO still outsources the help to Inja. So I'm thinking of building my own box. The slightly shady retailer TigerDirect.com (which does business under twenty-three names, including Circuit City) has combos and a 12-percent rebate from Bing.com. (The BUGMIESTERS strike again!) Once you decide to do-it-yourself you plunge into a world of debates over angels on the heads of pins, only the angels and pins are motherboards, and the relative speed of Intel's chips -- is an 860 better than a 930? A P55 board or an X58? -- and that geekiness-uber-alles of OVERCLOCKING, and WATER COOLING, and NewEgg.com rankings, and you start to wonder why you want to buy a computer, let alone build one. And DON'T get started on GRAPHICS CARDS -- or even PSUs. And then you must worry that you'll blow your thousand-dollar-plus amalgamation up even though the chances are supposedly remote. Regardless I'm leaning on building one, which Intel has actually made sort-of fun -- you just drop the chip in the slot, chose a latch, pop the stock cooler over the chip, and voila! However having already destroyed one old computer by jamming the memory cards in the wrong way one can't be too sanguine.