Fixin’ The ‘Puter

Sure, I do it for a living, but from time to time, ones personal technology takes a long steamer, as mine did a couple of weeks ago.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that; as technology fails, but one would think that someone who bashes electrons for a living would have a stone solid personal piece.  You would be wrong.

As the old aphorism goes, the Cobbler’s Children always have the worst shoes.  Those of us who bash iron professionally are usually of two camps.  Camp A:  A nitrogen-cooled beast, overclocked out to one red c-hair back from “Aluminum Smelter” with 64 Gig of RAM and a half a petabyte of personal storage.  NASA calls us up when they want to run some heavy duty simulations. 

Camp B:  Some clapped out AMD barely able to run Solitaire, let alone any apps worth listing, that was last updated with Jack Layton had hair.

To disprove the rule, we sit between the two polar extremes.  A modest desktop, five years old, with way too much storage built into and around it.  However, like all technology, the motherboard up and died a couple of weeks ago.  You know it is time for the black armband services when it won’t recognize a PS2 keyboard. 

So we went looking for a new piece.  We do know that buying at the bleeding edge is brutally expensive and has more risks than offering to swap photos with Rep. Anthony Weiner, so we avoid going there.  The objective was to build wisely, without having to sell an internal organ to a Saudi prince to pay for the gear. 

We wanted a grownup case, without whirling LED lights hung off the fans and 3-D holograms of some airbrushed gaming Amazonian warrior princess from an obscure first-person shooter.  We wanted something that would take all the external drives and somehow convince them to live inside a proper chassis.  Then there was RAM.  We know that 8 is great but 16 is simply faaabulous, so there had to be room to grow, extra slots and a BIOS that won’t go stupid in a years’ time.

After much reading, link clicking and cross-referencing we wound up with a nice, one year-back from bleeding edge processor, with room to grow the RAM.  A power supply that won’t make choking noises when you plug in a USB key and a new home for seven formerly outboard bigazz drives.  Yes, there is a lot of disk space in the case and a lot of it gets used thanks.  Tweaks?  A few, modest ones, but nothing that will void a warranty or cause puddles of molten solder to wind up on our desk. 

Which means, simply, that we can write again, having exhausted all available post-work cycles on finding, building and configuring a new ‘puter with parts from here, there and everywhere in between.