My music computer decided to go down in a blaze of glory a few nights ago. Emphasis on the blaze. I don’t know if flames were actually involved, but smoke certainly was. The house still stinks of it.
The power supply burnt out, and it seems it took the motherboard with it when it went, so $796 later, I have a new computer.
I took a different route to normal this time – I bought a pre-assembled system from the computer fair. I decided that I just couldn’t be bothered going to the effort of finding all the parts and assembling it myself – not this time at least.
The new machine is an Athlon 64 X2 3800, with 2G of memory, a 250GB hard drive, a GeForce 7100 video card and a Dual layer DVD writer.
The components – particularly the case, motherboard and video card – are probably not what I would have chosen, had I picked them myself, but it’ll do. It’s certainly an improvement over the Athlon XP 1700+ it’s replacing.
I had intended it as an interim computer until I can afford to buy something better, but it’s probably good enough to serve as my primary desktop machine for the foreseeable future – particularly with a video card upgrade. I still want two more though – a high end machine for music, and a budget (even more so than this one) one as my file and backup server. The latter is probably next on the list, as my current server appears to have gone out in sympathy.
However, there shall be no more computer purchases until I’ve had time to actually save some money – I have a goal of $3000 for September, the fact that I was able to manage this unexpected $800 indicates that it should be possible, but only if I don’t have to spend $800 on unexpected expenses every bloody month.
In the mean time, I suspect my backup server will have to live on as a VMWare instance…
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
