Breathing new life into an old system

Budgetary concerns have finally hit me where it matters most: my choice of PC. Until now, my PC purchases have been parallel to the mindset of the guy at Best Buy who is loading a 60" plasma tv into the back of a beat up pick up truck filled with teenage kids and a wife. In other words, I could be eating tuna out of the can with a spoon but still be able to turn anti-aliasing all the way up.

Alas, gone are the days of $80 keyboards - at least temporarily. After having sold three systems, two of which were Asus gaming laptops that never ran hot and the third being an HP tower with specs that absolutely make me cry now that it's gone, I've realized that my system purchases need to have more function for what I pay for them - especially if I might need to sell them for an incredible discount during desperate times.

A little less than two months ago I purchased a used HP for $140. It came with a Pentium 4 and an older LCD monitor. The purpose of this purchase was to run Netflix on my TV while doing other stuff (like creating labor-intensive photoshops of President Obama doing extremely offensive things with our beautiful, pure white women). I spent $130 on upgrades, and my final specs are as follows:

Pentium 4 HT 2.8 GHZ (Stock)
2.5 GB Ram (Upgrade)
PCI Geforce 5200 256 MB Dual VGA Graphics Card (Upgrade for dual monitors)
3 Port 6-Pin Firewire PCI adapter (Upgrade for access to 1 TB Firewire external drive)
60 GB Internal HDD (Stock)
Kingston External Multi-Card Reader (Upgrade)
Wireless Keyboard and Laser Mouse Combo (Upgrade)
Logitech S-220 2.1 Speakers (Upgrade)
Diamond 7.1 Sound Card (Upgrade)
Windows XP Professional (Stock)

Total Cost: $270 (including original PC and monitor)

I understand that for $100 more, or better yet $200 more I could have gotten a Core2Duo system new, and maybe a monitor from Dell, but it wouldn't have included the extra firewire ports or a dual monitor setup. While the specs are not very strong, I had a vision of my pc monitor on one side of the room and my lcd tv on the other side - the former for general tasks and the latter for movies. Typically, when building a system, I find that costs are underestimated - things like wireless keyboards, speakers, multi-card readers, etc are sort of ignored as part of the cost of a competent system. The Ram and cpu numbers get all the attention, as if that were the only functional part of the system worth paying for. Speakers, firewire upgrades, etc. are like incidentals swept under a rug when it comes to filling in the balance sheet.

These things need to be included, however, because they are just as much a cost of having a fully functional and completely compatible PC as anything else, and most manufacturers leave them out on budget system simply because people who "just need a computer" control the budget arena and do not demand these simple extra perks.

 

I use old computers too, but probably for a different reason. I spent $3000 on a gaming system about 7 years ago and watched its value drop to about $100 within a couple of years as the hardware went obsolete. That alone was enough to spoil the experience of having something new. Unless it's for work where you really need something fast, it seems like a big waste of money. Most computers, even the high-end ones, will end up in a junk pile within a few years.

I find computers (laptops, desktop, server towers) in the trash or along the roadside that have specs similar (some better, some worse) to yours. I do a lot of gaming -- I just play games that have been out for a couple of years and have had no major problems with the speed of the hardware.

 

^ ouch. A bit of looking around when getting a PC, especially if you can make one/have one made custom. I spent around 3K for my current system three years ago, and while I can't play everything with everything turned up, it still runs quite well.

The biggest thing that got me off the computer equipment Red Queen race was toning back the gaming. I just don't have time these days, but as a media centre my computer is brilliant. Fallout 3 still looks pretty good too

 

I realized the same thing about badass systems. It pissed me off the most with my last tower, when I was so proud of installing a new power supply, plugging in 8 GB, etc., and then 6 months later Dell has back to school specials for people who don't know dick about computers that have specs only slightly worse than my "dream msystem." I've really grown up alot in that regard. Unfortunately, this involved sucking a lot of the passion out of my pc use. They're commodities now. The only project I've seriously thought of putting some time into is building a custom colling system and solid-state pc that can run coffee roasting software for tons of hours in a hot coffee roasting environment, or another high-heat environment.