Building a new computer

[Tokyo Slim]

Originally Posted by rnoldh

Thanks Slim.

Coming from you I appreciate the input.

It's for a girl that needed a computer and she will do the basics. Get online,surf, use MS Office a little, some music and some MP3s ( nothing complex ).

Would you leave the XP Professional on it?

Or I have a small business licensed copy of Windows 7 ( with like up to 12 installations ). Would you put the Windows 7 on it now, wait for the first SP, or perhaps not do it at all?

I'd say the media center integration would be worth the upgrade, but XP should work just fine. I guess it depends on how nice you want to be.

[whiteslashasian]

I concur that for $200, that is quite a good deal on a decently powerful computer (at least for what your friend will require). The copper Zalman HSF on there is worth $35+ by itself lol. I had one of those on my old 3700+ San Diego and it things frosty and quiet.

[GQgeek]

Originally Posted by rnoldh

GQgeek

You've made an old man cry.

You've pictured the Compaq "suitcase portable". Compaq is a Houston company started by some Rice U. guys and I had one of the first.

I could tell some stories of Compaq's founding, but I won't. They really were/are a Houston institution.

My father's company first gave him a compaq portable 2 and then upgraded him to a 3 when it released. The Portable 3 was an awesome machine. I got tons of enjoyment out of it over the years. It's sort of amazing to think back about all the years we had it and that we never had a problem. I'd still have it if it hadn't been stolen when our house was robbed soon after we moved to quebec. I've considered buying one on ebay but it wouldn't have been mine so it's not the same, besides which, I threw out all my old floppies a few years ago so i'd have nothing to put on to it. I think it cost around 7k back when it was released in the late 80s. It had a 40MB hard drive, 640k, and a 12mhz 286 processor, and a plasma screen. It was way better than my friends' nintendos imo.

[rnoldh]

I'm amazed you remember it. We called it the suitcase computer because it looked like a suitcase. It must have weighed 15 Lbs.

And then to make it better, the early cell phones were the Motorola brick:



For those that were poor or cheap like me was the "contractor's phone":



Between carrying the Compaq suitcase computer and the "Contractor's Phone" it was quite a workout.

[GQgeek]

I spent thousands of hours on it. Of course I'd remember it. ;p

[Ace Rimmer]

^^ hah, my parents bought my sister a "bag phone" in the early 1990s because they wanted her to have a phone in her car (in case she broke down). They also bought her a nice Volvo sedan so she would have a "safe" car to drive! I, on the other hand, got no cell phone and I had to buy my own car ....

Hey, wait these memories aren't very happy.

[Toiletduck]

Done~

[Toiletduck]

[milosh]

Just got the same card yesterday.

[Ace Rimmer]

Nice, clean build toiletduck. May I ask why you stuck with the stock Intel Core i7 cooler?

[Rambo]

Originally Posted by Ace Rimmer

Nice, clean build toiletduck. May I ask why you stuck with the stock Intel Core i7 cooler?

Plus why is there no optical drive?

Some zip ties and creative wire bending would help out the air flow in there.

[Tokyo Slim]

Originally Posted by Toiletduck

[Toiletduck]

This is the initial build and there will be a few minor tweaks in the coming weeks like:

Cleaning up the wires :-P
Putting in new cpu fan

There isn't an optical drive because I really don't have a use for one. Have an external DVD drive at the ready, but everything really comes through my gigabit lan line over another computer or the internet

I happened upon an orangey red psu by vortex. Seemed to fit the ati gfx card quite nicely :-)

[javyn]

Since I gave up gaming right after college, my pocket book has been thanking me.

My most recent computer "upgrade" was taking the old computer home from work after we got upgraded there. Went home with a brand spanking old Athlon 2.0ghz with a 60 gig HD. Spent 20 bucks upgrading to 2 gigs of ram, and threw Ubuntu on that bitch. I love it.

For viewing movies, mp3s, pictures, nothing beats a WD TV for the price! I know Popcorn Hour lets you add a hard drive, but hell, I don't mind walking 4 feet from my PC to my TV with the external hard drive if it means saving $150 going for a WD over Popcorn, not counting the cost of a new hard drive.

The only reason I'd have opted for a Popcorn Hour is that you can get a 40 dollar wifi addon to let you stream youtube, but since I can easily download youtube videos and convert them to AVI or MP3, who cares?

edit: Okay I haven't completely given up gaming. Sometimes I'll fire up Frozen Bubble or Gnometris for the hell of it.

[yfyf]

Originally Posted by Kent Wang

Yeah, I was wondering if it was possible to get cheap parts in Hong Kong or the Mainland. Here in the US, there's Newegg and a ton of cheap internet retailers. Though of course most of the stuff is actually made in China to begin with.

USA is still the cheapest. They do have a Newegg.com.cn run by the same folks. If I'm in Shanghai, I usually get my stuff from there even though it's a little more expensive.

Hong Kong is somewhere in the middle, not as cheap as USA, not as expensive as China.

What you find every once in a while, is a manufacturer will push a certain product aggressively in China and it will be priced lower than anywhere else in the world. Everything else in his lineup will be more expensive but that particular product will be cheap. I managed to get Sennheiser HD 595s for USD 160 this way. At the time, they were going for about USD 250 in the US.