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پیر 3 مارچ 2008Monday, March 03, 2008

How Zack Buys a New PC

The title has been shamelessly stolen from Photodude.

Last July, I was having a lot of trouble with my Dell laptop. So I wanted to backup the data in my hard drive. I went to Fry’s to get an enclosure for the laptop hard disk so I could connect it via USB to my old desktop. There I started looking at computer components. But in the end returned with only the USB enclosure.

By the weekend, I had decided I wanted a new desktop since my old one was almost 8 years old (Pentium III 550MHz) and the laptop was still not working. The good thing is that Fry’s has people who can help you with selecting the appropriate parts for your computer. I do still recommend doing your own research in advance, but they are helpful.

The question that Captain Arrrgh asked was why build one’s own computer. I agree that it is not really cheaper to do that and requires some research and technical know-how. But it is fun. And it gives me an opportunity to wander in Fry’s for hours. Plus I get the exact machine I want.

So here’s what I got:

The hard disk and RAM are in my opinion critical in a computer’s operation, more so than the processor speed. I did not get 4GB since a 32-bit operating system (Windows XP Professional in my case) is limited to about 3.5GB of RAM. Two hard disks, with operating system and programs on one and data on the other, work much better and the Raptor is really fast. My Windows XP boots up so fast I can’t believe it. And Photoshop is also much faster than before.

There was one important factor in selecting the components and that was for the power supply. Not only did I need a power supply with more wattage than required for the components, I also had to check what the current requirements for the individual 5V and 12V rails were.

Assembly was a breeze. The components, especially the processor, need to be handled properly, but that’s it. If you are interested, here are the installation instructions for Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

I ran into a problem while installing Windows and chipset drivers that came with the motherboard. I was getting the dreaded blue screen of death. At first, I suspected the hard disk, but some testing showed it to be a memory problem. Or more accurately a reading problem on my side. The timing settings of the RAM were being read automatically from SPD EEPROM but the voltage setting was not. The motherboard BIOS was defaulting to 1.8V while the memory specifications called for 2.0V. So all I had to do was change that setting manually in the BIOS and it worked perfectly.

It took me a few days to reinstall all the software and get all my data from my old desktop and my laptop.

Later, Michelle demanded a computer of her own, so I gave her my old desktop. Since I didn’t want to buy another copy of Windows, I installed Ubuntu Linux on it. Now I am searching for all kind of programs for young kids for Linux. I installed Debian for Juniors package, GCompris and whatever else I could find on the Ubuntu repositories. My plan is to keep her computer disconnected from the net unless we need to connect for some reason. This will keep all kinds of issues away, I hope.

Tags: abit, computer, frys, hard disk, intel, linux, nvidia, parenting, processor, windows

Posted by Zack at March 3, 2008 12:18 PM in Internet , Life , Parenthood , Science and Technology

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Comments

Amazing! You had been using a 550MHz processor? Sounds hilarious :P

Posted by: Qadeer Ahmad (3 comments) at March 3, 2008 3:29 PM

thanks finally you wrote :P
you mentioned you work on video processing so i assume you didnt do any of that on ur old pc did u? plus what machines do you use for your professional work i mean the video processin thing.

Posted by: بدتمیز (20 comments) at March 4, 2008 2:16 AM

Qadeer: The Pentium 3 was packed for a few years. I used my Pentium 4 laptop for everything.

Badtamiz: No, the old desktop wasn’t up to the task for image/video processing.

Posted by: Zack (1765 comments) at March 4, 2008 12:12 PM

spoiled. :-)

Posted by: renee (119 comments) at March 4, 2008 9:25 PM

If I am correct, you did than some time back. Any way I wanted to say that my dear Michelle is masha Allah ahead of you by about 13 years because I got you a computer when you were about 16 year and 6 month . Ha ha ha.

Posted by: Ajmal (306 comments) at March 6, 2008 3:10 AM

Oh, I’m still digesting the specs :)

A fast parenting machine … reminds me of the happy times when my system had 6 GB of HDD and Win 3.1/DOS were happy go lucky OS’…!

Life’s changing pretty quickly now!!

Posted by: Asma (45 comments) at March 11, 2008 3:49 PM

Renee: That’s the idea.

Dad: Yeah it was months ago, but I didn’t get around to writing about it.

Posted by: Zack (1765 comments) at March 24, 2008 12:29 PM

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