Rebuilding

Unfortunately, on Sunday of this week, my desktop computer died an untimely death. It was a two-year-old desktop. This was my first system build from the ground up, and a small form factor pc from Shuttle. The SN41G2 with an Athlon XP 2800+ processor, 160 GB hard drive, and Plextor 740A optical drive was still an able performer and had aged gracefully over the last two years. While it was not bleeding edge performance by any means, I rarely play games, and it was a wonderful machine. To say that I was a little emotionally attached to this computer is probably an understatement.

Over the last week, I’ve gone through the usual states of grief: shock, sadness, and anger. In the end, I’m ready to move on and have realized that this is nothing that a couple of hundred bucks won’t fix even if I wasn’t planning an upgrade.

The first thing is that I’ve worked on getting my hard drive in an external case. A few scraped knuckles later, and at least I can access my data that I hadn’t gotten a chance to back up yet. This at least softened the blow considerably.

Now comes the fun part. I pay a lot closer attention to the peripherals market than the processor and motherboard market. Over the last week I’ve been catching myself up to date on the latest hardware, and planning out a new system. I’m still divided if a dual core is worth the added expense at this point. After all, I was plenty happy with my Athlon XP so it would be more bragging rights than necessary functionality. Then again, the added horsepower is always welcome, and who knows what I could do with it.

In the meantime, my 19” LCD sits idle, and I’m living off my notebook (an Averatec 3250HX with a 12” screen). The laptop is quite functional, except for the screen, and will allow me to keep on blogging in the meantime. I've also hooked up a desktop mouse to the notebook, and it feels a lot more like a desktop now (highly recommended). At least it’s more up to date than my older desktop with a K6-2 475 MHz processor. I tried using it on the ‘net a few days ago to discover that it wouldn’t display a website properly- I was using IE 5.5!

Well, that’s my obituary to my Shuttle. Let’s just say I won’t be buying another one. I wish I had something that the motherboard wasn't tied to the case at this point. Expect some rants and raves about the rebuilding process over the next days (and perhaps weeks, but hopefully not).

--Jonas