It appears I bought this computer in mid 2007. It's served me very well, and 6
1/2 years seems to me a good run.
It still runs flawlessly; only one part ever went bad, a DVD drive, and that
seems mechanical, so I might be able to
fix it. But it's IDE, so I probably won't even bother opening it up.
But technology has left it behind, 32 bit, so only 3 GB of useful memory, SATA
1.
In the past, I bought Systemax semi custom boxes from TigerDirect, but that is
gone. Searching for custom built boxes,
it seems they are all gamer oriented. A couple won't even configure a system
without a video board, or two, or three.
For PS, one needs no more than the video GPU on the processor chip. The spread
between component costs and completed
price seems to have skyrocketed.
So I bit the bullet, and ordered a bunch of bits. In the past, much would have
been from Amazon. Now that they collect
CA sales tax, cherry picking a couple of items to save a very few $ didn't seem
worth the trouble.
I ordered everything from Egghead, and wow, they sure deliver! Order completed
about 1:47 pm Tuesday. Boxes sitting
inside my front gate before 5:45 pm Wednesday. Less than 28 hours!!
We were leaving for the evening when we found the stuff. I opened the boxes
last night, but didn't really get going til
about 12:30 today. I took my time, and only made a couple of very minor errors
in order that meant undoing anything. I
did stop for things like eating, checking email and my daily meditation.
Booted up first try! By about 9 pm, I had a fully functioning Win 7 machine,
with antivirus and ZA firewall installed,
browser and internet access. Since then, Windoze has been installing updates,
like 130 of them. Installing updates is
taking longer than installing Windoze, which was quick and easy.
I'm not sure when I last built a box from scratch. I've done everything else,
updating adding, replacing everything up
to a motherboard over the years. It seem that the process is actually easier
than before. I bought box, power supply and
front combo box with card reader, USB connectors and eSata all from Rosewill
brand, and they fit together perfectly.
There's still a long road ahead of installing software. I have an apparently
endless list of stuff installed on this old
box, and want to install only what I need now.
I can hardly wait to use PSCC on the faster, four core Intel, Samsung 840 EVO
SSD and 16 GB of memory!
I was originally going with a 250 GB boot drive and 1 TB mechanical drive, but
$60 off on the 500 GB drive meant I could
simply go with one drive for normal computer stuff and have lots of room for
the same price. I've gotten along with a
256 GB boot drive 'til now ...
I also have a 128 GB SATA 3 SDD for PS cache and image files I'm working on.
The 3 TB primary image storage drive will
migrate when I get PS going. Other big stuff, scanned images, video, etc is on
eSATA external drives. (I made sure to
get a motherboard with 8 SATA headers, so I will have eSATA connectors front
and back.) :-)
Here's the semi-intelligible list of bits:
MB ASROCK|Z87 EXTREME4 LGA1150 R
PSU ROSEWILL|RD500-2SB 500W RT
CPU INTEL|CORE I7 4770K 3.5G 8M R
SSD 500G|SAMSUNG MZ-7TE500BW R
CARD READER ROSEWILL | RDCR-11004 R
MEM 8Gx2|GSKILL F3-1866C9D-16GXM R
MS WIN 7 PRO SP1 64-BIT 1PK - OEM
CASE ROSEWILL|CHALLENGER RT
Faster Than A Speeding Moose
--
What if the Hokey Pokey *IS* what it's all about?
--
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