New Computer

Several weeks ago my desktop computer died. I suspect that my RAM went kaput and I suppose I could have fixed it but it was time for a new computer anyway. My old one was old enough that my employer was actually throwing away computers that were better/faster. For a computer geek this was a truly shameful situation. With an eye towards redeeming myself in the eyes of my fellow geeks, I set about searching for a new computer.

I gave considerable thought to purchasing a pre-built computer from Dell but ultimately decided that building was a better approach. By building it myself I could get all the components that I wanted in exactly the configuration that I wanted. I could also buy quiet components. This was particularly important to me as my last computer did a really good impression of a jet engine.

The computer is now complete and working quite well. It has a 3.4 Gigahertz processor, 1GB of DDR2 800 RAM, a nVidia x1300 PCIe video card with 512MB memory, and a motherboard that supports RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. The whole thing is extremely quiet, runs very quickly, and is a huge improvement over what I had. The last thing I want to do is buy four SATA drives so that I can setup a RAID 5 array. For around $360 in drives I can have 800GB of storage with single drive redundancy such that if a drive goes bad I don't lose any data.

I love being a computer geek.