Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The new home computer (Part 1: The Decision)
It was time. The "primary workstation" an HP Pavilion (circa 2000) Pentium III 733 Mhz 768M Ram was starting to show it's age. I've done all the nips 'n tucks I could: More memory (originally 256M), larger disk (Originally 40G) USB 2.0 card (USB 1.1 on board) but there comes a time ... especially when Lisa wants to do video editing ... that nothing I could do would matter. It was time to send the old boy off to the basement ... maybe to be re-incarnated as a Linux Media Server.
It didn't make sense to build my own .... PCs have gotten to be like cars ... the individual parts cost more then the complete product .... also when something goes wrong their are multiple throats to choke .... When you buy a PC built by a vendor it's one number to call (even though they may not be much help anyway ... more on that later.
Fortunately companies like DELL and HP allow you to build a PC to suit your needs. I went with HP because I haven't had much luck with DELL support in work .... sure they are a few dollars cheaper ... but you know how that goes. HP has a build to order site .... and the last Pavilion lasted 8 years with just a fan replacement so why not. (Truth be told ... the 40G hard drive seized at some point to ... but that was after it was moved out of the box and reclaimed for another project .... The kids still haven't forgiven me for their lost "Aurthur's Teacher Trouble" game saves)
The base machine is an HP M9100T, to which I upgraded from a Core 2 Duo to a Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz, from 2 GB ram to 4GB ram ... 300 GB SATA to 500 GB SATA .... 256MB video RAM to 512MB Video RAM .. from a 19" LCD Panel to a 22" LCD panel. In short ... loaded for bear and hoping to get another 8 years out of it.
This wasn't an easy or flip decision. Lisa actually asked the question "Why not a Mac??" To which I replied , "hmmm ... why not?" Especially considering the "Vista" alternative. I'd do anything to avoid selling my soul to the evil empire.
You may be asking: "Why not Linux Mr. geek??" Well ... I'm not going to be the primary user ..... and Lisa is already familiar with Photoshop and all of her other tools .... FOSS works well for me but it may be a little rough around the edges for Lisa ... and she has a very low tolerance for computers that don't do what she wants them to do :) (Remember the scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when Scotty picked up the mouse on the computer and said "Ah how quaint" )
We set up a "personal shopping" appointment with the Apple store in Lehigh Valley. The system we considered was a 20 iMac. I probably would have upgraded to the 2.4Ghz model and brought the memory up to 2GB. The price would have been somewhere in the $1800 range.
The Machine is sweet to look at ... has a very friendly user interface .... runs a variant of BSD Unix underneath so it had plenty of geek appeal for me. Lisa liked it, the built in apps for music, video, and photo work looked easy to use. We were seriously considering it.
As nice as it was I couldn't get passed the price/performance ratio .... for the same amount of money I could get a fully tricked out PC. I don't mind paying a premium for quality ... and in many cases I prefer it ... but it just seemed like to big of a gap.
I ordered the HP M9100T.
#posted by Rob Roschewsk @ 12:18 PM