Diary of a Wolfeman

Or, “The Trials and Tribulations of Buying Online”

For weeks now, I have been hungrilly searching through the inventoru at NewEgg, cobling together the list of parts that would eventually become my latest computer build. I’ve probably spent about 6 hours on this since January.

One thing about me though, is that I am impatient. When my tax refund arrived on Friday, there was now way in hell I was going to wait another two days for shipping, and then probably until the end of the week before I could actually meld thos parts together into a computer. Saturday morning, I went to Fry’s.

The problem with having spent so much time getting the perfect list of parts and then going to another store is not always finding what you spec’d out. I think the only two things on the original list that made it into the final build are the processor and the MP3 player I wanted. The rest is “close enough”. Here’s what actually made it into ‘Hyperion’:

Antec tower case (I wanted a Centurion, but they didn’t have the no-psu model, and I wasn’t going to pay $40 for a psu I was going to throw away)
Antec SmartPower 500W modular psu (spec was 450W, got this for the same price)
AMD 3700+ 64-bit proc
ECS nForce4 motherboard (spec was an MSI model)
2Gb PC2100 RAM (1 gig from the old box, another gig I had lying around without enough motherboard slots)
eVGA 256 Mb GeForce 6600 PCI-E video (this change was good – it turns out the eVGA 6800XT board I saw at NewEgg is a typo and doesn’t exist)
a pair of Maxtor 100Gb SATA drives in swap bays (spec was Western Digital 40 Gb SATA, which they were out of; these were 15$ more each)
Creative Zen Micro 6Gb MP3 player. (Ok, not a computer part, but damn cool anyway :) )

This is my first time really playing around with a 64-bit processor, and so far I am mightily impressed by the speed. I’m used to having to wait a tick or three when I click on an icon, but the AMD 3700+ reacts almost instantly. OpenOffice.org Calc opens in less than four seconds – without the quickstarter. Firefox in less than two! I can’t wait until I get some time to install Kubuntu’s 64-bit edition.

Ahh….new computer bliss ;)

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2006 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.