Bitter and stressed after a semi-busy work week I get home and check my paycheck specification. Praise the Lord: my expenses from the recent London trip will get paid back this month. In other words, I’m stinking filthy rich for a while (compared to my usual self which mostly just encompasses two of those three).

Now, what to do with my newfound fortune? Find some well-deserving charities? Travel around the world? Buy prostitutes and beer? Nope, none of that. My plan is as follows:

1. Buy a new computer.
2. Take a weekend cruise to Finland.
3. Finally get a vacation; I’m thinking of going to Egypt or Cyprus for a week. If I go to Egypt I’ll make sure to visit Spitfire Bar. Apparently, this bar is the inspiration for Pratchett’s Broken/Mended Drum in the Discworld series. I tried to explain my fascination with this old soldier bar to some friends of mine. The bastards just stared blankly at me when I accidentally said something along the lines of: “Just imagine! You enter this run-down solder-infested hellhole… Everywhere around you are tough-as-nails soldiers.” I might have said something about bulging muscles as well. They kindly suggested that this might have some Freudian undertones, and that my closet door isn’t completely shut. Bah!

Anyway, I’m ridiculously enthusiastic about point number one. I seriously feel excited at the thought of buying some new hardware, putting it together, installing a dual-boot XP/Vista machine, trying out new games and applications and whatnot, and so on. In fact – this may sound a bit kinky – I think that the excitement is similar to sexual arousal. No, not physical arousal. I don’t experience anything protuberating in the lower abdominal area, of course. But the desire for new computer components is a bit disturbing, and probably matches the expectations of bedding a lass in intensity.

This reminds me of an amusing anecdote back when I was living in a “student corridor.” (If you’re wondering why I don’t say dorm, it’s…well…because it’s not a dorm room. A student room here isn’t located on campus, for one thing, and it’s a complete 20 square meter flat with a shower and bathroom of its own. There’s a kitchen-and-TV-area which is shared by eight students in a corridor, though.) I was waiting for a delivery of new hardware; I think it was a graphics card (Geforce 2 MX) and a harddrive. My neighbour was also expecting new hardware, and we happened to receive our packages the very same day. Giddy like schoolboys (which we technically were), we skipped up the stairs to our corridor, grinning like morons all the time. This neighbour had a girl over, and she sighed at the sight of us:

“Computer nerds! Here’s a cute girl, but all you care about is your new toys! Do you really have your priorities straight?”

Of course we gave her sharp glances and told her to shut up – the computer components might have gotten upset otherwise. We cradled the hardware comfortingly for fifteen minutes anyway, just to be sure.

And now I’m thinking of going through this time of excitement again. This is the preliminary list of what I’m getting:

• Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13 GHz. It’s not the best performance money can buy, but I think it’s pretty decent for the money.
• Asus P5B motherboard. I like Asus, and this one has pretty much everything I could need except for firewire. But I really don’t have anything using firewire right now.
• 2 GB of PC6400 DDR2 RAM.
• MSI GeForce 7900GT Passive Cooling 256Mb. There are more impressive graphics cards available, but I’m fond of the idea of passive cooling on a pretty-high-end card.
• Antec Case Perfomance One P180B. Looks pretty okay, and apparently it has good cooling capabilities. Might be useful with a passive graphics card.
• Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum. Most motherboards have built-in audio, but the latency for MIDI keyboards is horrible, and they’re just 16 bit (I think). This one comes with a remote as well!

And the rest of the small stuff that aren’t quite as important. Now, I’m sure someone started to wonder why I’m just getting good stuff instead of the best if I’m – to quote myself – stinky filthy rich. Well, I lied about that last part. I can afford this, but if I spend any more I’ll have to eat gruel for a month…or cut down on my alcohol consumption. Not gonna happen.

Considering the items above and with a budget along those lines: do you think that this is a decent computer setup? Can you suggest any alternative components? The things I’m most concerned with are the three Ps: price, performance and pnoise.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Computers, Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.