It's been over 8 years, Finally getting a new computer!

I'm excited and can't sleep, so I wanted to share why with my good friends at CPF!

It's been since back around 2002 that I bought my last computer. Which is what I am sitting in front of now. A 1GHZ G4 eMac w/1GB PC133 RAM/Radeon 7500 (dual display hack)/60GB PATA drive. I have an external 19" CRT attached in dual mode for more desktop space.

If I recall, I think I spent about $850 on this thing. It was on some kind of special deal before a product change that came with some extra RAM (512 instead of 256, I added the other 512 to put it at a gig right away), slightly larger HD all at a "reduced" price... heh....plus around a hundred bucks for the scratch-n-dented 19" CRT.

I've been a mac guy since as long as I've been old enough to have access to a computer, but have owned linux/windows boxes on and off in the past as well (usually running side by side with a mac).

I dig the Mac OS but have been tempted by the growing gap between Apple prices and possible "home-brew" hardware builds for less. I have decided to give linux a try for this go around. I've been going round and round on what direction to go for the next machine for the last year or more. I think Apple's price hike on the new mini was the deciding factor. If they had gone DOWN $100 instead of UP I'd probably be buying another mac and being done with it as that's a simple straight forward solution to having something newer/faster.

I ran slackware back in the early 2000s so have enough familiarity to get going again I think. I'll be running 64 bit ubuntu for this go around because there is a lot of online support for it which should make it easier for me to get things up and working the way I want.

So, I've spent free time in the last week or 2 getting all caught up on the modern world of computer hardware. I scoured NewEgg and joined a popular builders forum to get up to speed on the latest trends for budget builds.

I went AMD to keep the price under control. Using combo specials and various discount items I was able to put together a quad core machine with 4GB RAM, 1TB drive, and a GTX460 video card for $630 shipped. I also found a 21.5" 1080P LCD samsung refurb at a local joint for ~$140. If I send in a couple mail-in-rebates the total cost of the machine (including new monitor, but no fancy OS) will be about the same as a mac mini (without monitor but with fancy OS). The goal was not to exceed the price of the mini (since that would have been my alternative), and at the same time, exceed the mini in performance by at least double if possible.

I have the new monitor setup and running now on the old mac and it's beautiful. The rest of the parts will all be here in about 14 hours from now when UPS shows up. Not sure if I'll be able to sleep tonight. Have that same excited feeling in my gut that I had back in my geekier days of building comps and going to LAN parties

I had forgotten how much fun it is putting together a "build" for a new machine. It's a great experience. I think anyone who digs personal-computing should do it at least once.

Eric

mdocod said:

I had forgotten how much fun it is putting together a "build" for a new machine. It's a great experience. I think anyone who digs personal-computing should do it at least once.

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You know, I think building a computer has a lot of similar excitement to trying to pick out a new flashlight - comparing all the specs, the prices, the reviews, the benchmarks, the different usage scenarios and agonizing over the decisions of what to actually buy. Something about the complexity of it all is fun.

:thumbsup: Ubuntu :thumbsup:

Yeah I went the way of Ubuntu when my windows XP computer started acting up; it's been 3 years now and I now use Windows Vista but I find that Ubuntu is still a more robust OS.

P.S. never got into the whole apple/Mac business but a friend swears by them :shrug:

Jeremy.

Hi XB70,

That sounds like a great idea!

For years, I have used an external firewire drive to backup my important files. I keep everything important in my home folder on OS X, and every few weeks I make a disk image of that folder to the external drive just as a precaution. It's usually only about 10 gigs.

There's plenty of expansion in the build I am doing to support many hard drives. At some point in time, I intend to setup some form of convenient backup internally. I probably won't use more than 20-25% of a TB drive in the anticipated future, so there are lots of options. The TB drive I bought worked out to ~$60 in a combo with the power supply. More space than needed but it was so cheap it just made sense. I'll probably short stroke it for better performance.

Eric

I built a new computer 2 years ago and I had used the same computer for about 10 years it was and AMD K6-450 with a 20 gig drive and a 64 meg PCI video card 192 megs of ram. I now have a core2duo 2.66Ghz with 2Gigs of ram and a 512meg video card. It is rock solid stable although it was really unstable when I first built it was hiccuping bad till I figured out one of the sata cables I got with the motherboard I attached to a dvdrom drive was bad causing the system to hang when explorer looked at the drives.

I think I'm on my third one since then. :green:

I know how you feel. My computer is 7.5 years old (IBM R51 laptop). Runs XP and is still quick to this day. My bro bought a new computer earlier this year; a desktop. 8 cores and all that. I asked him to load XP on it, then Vista, then Windows 7. He said Windows 7 was faster than XP to load.

Good luck with your new build.

XB70 said:

I learned a long time ago to clone instead of backing up critical files. Since HDs are cheap, it's way easier to clone the entire drive everyday.

If you implode and have your critical files backed up, you'll spend a week reloading programs and updates plus more time getting your preferences reset.

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My system is to use a program that copies any changed files from one drive to another drive and also keeps a copy of overwritten files. This protects me against hardware failure AND gives me a copy of the previous version of files I change in case I screw one of them up or corrupt one or accidentally delete one or whatever. I have this file copying run about once an hour or so. Just for my files though, I dont worry about programs - I'd be down for a bit if my drive with windows crashed, so that's the disadvantage. (250GB drive for OS + programs and two 500GB drives storing my data and a backup/ of my data - makes it really easy to format the OS this way)

I went AMD to keep the price under control.

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Intel fans still treat AMD users like 'white trash' or something, but it's still a very cost effective platform. I still use em', and happily build with AMD.

This thread really makes me want to build myself a new PC, as it's been far too long since my last build. There are few things I've found that are as satisfying as building a computer to your own specs, rather than the specs that "sell" computers.

+10 for backups. You can never have too many

I'll recommend Fedora if you decide Ubuntu isn't for you, or you prefer the KDE desktop environment. I've used both Fedora and several flavors of Ubuntu and I always seem to come back to Fedora.

I bought a new computer, 6 months later I ended up building a complete computer since I was not happy with performance of the store bought computer.
It was an exciting experience to build from scratch.

I'm up and running!!!

So far things are coming together. It's very much a from-scratch leaning experience. But I have the essentials working it seems. (networking, video drivers, etc).

It's like light-speed compared to my old machine!

mdocod said:

It's like light-speed compared to my old machine!

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Moore's law says it should be about 64 times faster..

Goodness, 8 years? That's an eternity to stay on the same machine (for me).

StarHalo said:

Moore's law says it should be about 64 times faster..

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I suspect that Moore's law is pretty accurate in this comparison. (at least in a ballpark).

I couldn't stand eight years on the same machine, I would not be able to upgrade the memory enough to keep up. I am primarily a web/email/IM person, but my vice is multitasking and as programs update, the toll on memory gets harder. I'd like to do some gaming every now and then, but due to my lack of employment the new memory and video card are on the back burner unless another memory stick fails.

Now when I say primarily web/email/IM I don't mean that I don't push my system, I wouldn't have a quad core if I didn't, I sometimes edit videos and run virtual machines and that really pushes the system, again mostly on memory.

I hope your mobo supports USB superspeed 3.0, it will be the new industry standard very soon and you wouldnt want to be outdated already. You might want to look into SSD's, they load windows and other programs so much faster and if you want to spend the cash get 2 SSD's and put the in raid 0.

I always built my desktop computers. That was lots of fun, and I liked having the computer exactly as I wanted it. But now I just use laptops so no more building fun for me.

With the specs of your new computer compared to the 8 year old one you had better strap yourself to the chair when you fire it up because it is going to blow you away.

USB3 and SATA6Gb can wait.

I've been using USB 1.1.

I suppose another $30-40 or so would have put those interfaces in the build, but I honestly do not anticipate needing those features in the near future. SD card-readers are the highest bandwidth devise I will use on the USB bus.

Eric

I have USB2 and eSATA on my system so USB 3 isn't needed as for now the main advantage is for external hard drives and external SATA is on par with USB3. MY external hard drive is connected via external SATA built into my mainboard. As for SATA 6GB, drives are not even fast enough to swamp 3G Sata yet so it would only help in burst mode once the small 64 meg cache is emptied the advantage is essentially about over. By the time USB3 obsoletes everything else I will be building a new computer again. I can see upgrading from USB1.1 to USB2 worthwhile but from USB2 to USB3 for the most part the improvement is a lot less dramatic.