As I mentioned, my plan was to buy a new PC once I got back to Manchester.
Luckily, the city has several great computer shops with some of the lowest prices
in the UK.
So, the day after I got back, I went over to one of the stores, accompanied
by my neighbour 'E'. She thought she might buy one too and I'd said I would put
it together for her.
Prices have really fallen lately. For £280 ($420) I got an AMD Duron
1300 CPU, fan, motherboard, 512Mb RAM, 40Gb harddrive, case, floppy drive, keyboard,
mouse, speakers and 48x12x48 CD rewriter. 'E' decided she would make an impulse
purchase and got the same, except for a different motherboard (I needed more PCI
slots). She bought a 17 inch monitor too.
Pretty soon I had all of this here in my flat. What a lot of cardboard boxes!
We could have had the systems assembled at no extra charge, but would have had
to wait a week. So I planned to do it myself instead. I'd done everything before,
except install a motherboard and the shop had put the CPUs and fans on the boards
ready for me.
It was surprisingly easy. Though I did manage to pull the plug off one of the
IDE cables and one of the floppy drives didn't read discs properly. We'll have
to exchange it.
I put together my system first, so I could get on with work. Having tried the
monitor that 'E' had bought, I decided I really couldn't put up with my old monitor
here. So I bought myself a 17 inch Samsung SyncMaster 753s (£97/$145).
It has a 0.23mm dot pitch, which is finer than most monitors. I love the smooth
picture quality and great colour, which reminds me of a Sony Trinitron... Not
sure yet, but I think the brightness and screen width changes very slightly as
it warms up. However, even so, it's tremendous value for money.
Then, last Saturday I spent the day putting together the hardware and software
for 'E. She'd never had a PC of her own before and, seeing the happiness and excitement
on her face, made the effort all worth while.
One thing I've always found very boring is having to reinstall Windows and
all of my software on a new drive or after a reformat. But recently I discoved
Norton Ghost (click
here to see this at Amazon.com),
which can make an image of a drive or partition. So now, having made an image
of my freshly-installed system and stored it on a CD, I can just copy the entire
thing back onto a drive in the future. It takes about ten minutes!
Talking of CDs, I can't get over being able to write a CD on the new drive,
in just over two minutes. My old writer took twenty!
I only had a P200 before, so my new PC is a little faster (understatement!).
I can't say I was unhappy with my old system. But I felt if I kept using it full-time
for another year it would probably break down. This way I'll only use it when
I go to the other house.
However, I also wanted a bit more power for video-making. With the new system
I can capture video at broadcast resolution. I can't wait to get broadband in
April!
I got an early Valentine's card! It plays 'I'm crazy for you' when I open it.
I know who it's from ;-)
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