The Infestation Continues
For the second time in as many months, we’ve got a package coming from Dell. Before people come at me with pitchforks, let me explain…
It has become increasingly obvious over the past few months that Ash’s computer is on its last leg, and even that leg is getting pretty damn wobbly. The fans all make horrible screeching noises at random intervals, the whole system is well over 3 years old and it’s definitely showing it, and I’m beginning to suspect that Ash emits some sort of EM field that destroys hard drives (this is but one of the reasons I keep my computer as far on the opposite side of the “office region” of the apartment as possible ;)). We’ve done as much as we can to keep the old box alive, giving it more RAM and a faster, slightly more modern AMD processor from the XP line, but age, abuse (from her and me, the previous owner), and the toll of being dragged cross-country in the dead of winter seem to have taken their toll on it (that, and it’s managed to acquire a performance-eating virus or two at some point). As a result, it’s become clear that there’s no way Ash is going to be able to keep the system going for the length of time required to save up for the kick-ass laptop she wants as her primary computer.
To that end, we trolled the depths of Dell’s outlet store again, looking for a cheap box she can wipe Vista off of and drop XP onto the second it gets plugged in. Since it’s pretty much a given that any computer on the market these days is already a head (if not heads and shoulders) above the performance and capabilities of her old box, we’re none too broken up about replacing it with something that can best be described as having “average” performance by today’s standards. So, by Monday there will be a second silver-gray Dell box sitting in our apartment, a fat clone of the slim case model I’m using for MAX and Uru. Since Ash doesn’t play many high-end games (I think the most advanced thing we’ve subjected a computer to so far is Portal), the integrated GeForce 61150 will do just fine, and runs Uru just as well if not better than the dedicated 5600 in her old box. Pile in the standard gig of RAM and a faster, dual-core system, and you’ve got yourself a nice (if not completely respectable) rig for the moderate usage Ash tends to subject her computers to (quite possibly the most intensive thing she tends to do is run Firefox with about 70+ tabs open at any given time… I think even that will give Photoshop a run for its money).
I continue to feel some incredible sense of wrongness bringing another PC into what has grown to be a rather universally pro-Mac apartment (even if there’s no way Ash would use one without Boot Camp at the ready), but buying something like an iMac is just beyond our financial limits at this point, a Mac Mini doesn’t seem to be worth it for what you get (specifically in terms of the graphics chipset), and Ash is holding out for a MacBook Pro anyway, so dropping a ton of money on a desktop machine she plans on replacing as soon as possible doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So, taking into consideration that we wanted to get a decently-spec’d system for as little money as humanly possible, it’s hard to go wrong with up an up to 50% discount on previously-”loved” hardware at the Dell outlet store online.