dr_kromm | The missing circuit is in your head!

My current PC has issues. By which I mean Issues. If we're comparing computers to economies, I've got the Weimar Republic here.

The main hard drive horked a couple of months ago. At the same moment, one of the optical drives disappeared from the system. I don't mean, "Windoze sucks, bah!"; I mean that even after checking cables, the BIOS couldn't see it. It was gone. That's more than a coincidence . . . something fundamental fried, and the ensuing transients killed a couple of devices.

Which doesn't surprise me. Not long before this incident, the p.s. fan grew noisy. Intermittently so, but its braying was unmistakable. My theory is that the p.s. is dying or at least very unstable.

Since then, I've managed to resurrect the system. I mean, I'm fairly competent with computers. It's patience that I lack.

But now the other optical drive has gone noisy -- very noisy, sometimes at random intervals. The graphics card occasionally fails to wake my monitor, and at least once has displayed some serious noise. And lots of little bits that would normally need periodic replacing anyway are also overdue for replacement, right down to the mouse.

So I have to face facts: This PC is living on borrowed time.

Option 1 is "repair the bugger." Added up, it needs about $500 in parts, assuming that nothing else was fried . . . and experience tells me that a dodgy p.s. means you can't make that assumption. Then I have to add in the downtime, which leads to the conclusion that it's actually cheaper for me to pay Computer Dude to do all this at his hourly rate, with the proper tools, than to do it myself with a Canadian Tire ratchet screwdriver. Oh, we have lots of tools . . . for woodworking. Nothing for computers.

Option 2 is the dreaded "replace the bugger." Now as it happens, I was looking to replace in March or April 2009 anyway, so this is a six-month-early replacement, not a one- or two-year-early replacement. And I don't have time to build it myself, so I'm looking at having a local place do that. That isn't free, although it's still a better deal than paying, say, Dell to ship me a mystery-meat motherboard, lowest-bidder drives, and so forth.

Looking at it hard (I mean, really boring holes with my eyes), I think that I have to bite the bullet and replace. This will come out of my pocket -- SJ Games doesn't give me a computer budget, unfortunately -- so at least I get to pick all the bits and pieces. I have three priorities, since this is a work PC and a home PC:

Work. This demands a big screen for proofing books; a large hard drive for endless rough PDFs of each book, and one with an excellent duty cycle at that, since I kill drives with my compulsive saving after every sentence; and lots of RAM, for having a zillion memory-hogging Word documents open at once.
Computer Gaming. What can I say? It's one of my de-stressors. This calls for a nice graphics card paired with a display that has a decent refresh rate; a respectable sound card; and a moderately fast (but not killer) processor. The cards will be PCIe 2.0, for future-proofing purposes.
Music. I listen to music a lot. A decent sound card isn't optional.

Minor priorities are the cooler P45 chipset and Gigabit ethernet. And I'm generally big on future-proofing whenever affordable. On the other hand, I don't program, do any audio or video encoding, or mess around with Photoshop or layout, so features relevant only to those things are irrelevant to me.

Right now, I'm looking at:

Motherboard: ASUS P5Q Premium (a P45 board with PCIe 2.0 support).
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz, 1,333MHz FSB).
Memory: 4MB OCZ DDR2-1066 (a.k.a. PC2-8500).
Hard Drive: Seagate ST3500320NS (a 500GB SATA drive rated for fairly heavy duty -- which I actually need, given how I work).
Sound Card: ASUS Xonar DX 7.1.
Graphics Card: ASUS EN9800GT Hybrid (a 512MB GeForce 9).
Display: Samsung 2253BW (a 22" widescreen LCD -- again, which I actually need, given how I work -- with a 2ms refresh time).
Case, Keyboard, Mouse, Optical Drive, Power Supply, Other Bits: Whatever Computer Dude recommends.

I'll also have to (re-)buy Windoze (Vista Home Premium 64-bit) and some MS product or other that includes Word (which I need for work). And yes, this will be a Windoze system. I know: Why am I spelling it funny, as if to show disrespect, and then buying it anyway? Simple: I don't need another learning curve right now.

So . . . do any of my friendly readers have thoughts or suggestions? I'm not exactly rich, so "You can make this less expensive without losing anything, because you missed [some wonderful underpriced component]!" is the sort of thing I'd really like to see. Comments like "Er, this one was rated 0/10 and catches fire!" are also good. However, I'd like to avoid OS wars, ATI vs. nVidia wars, etc.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think I can budget for it. Fortunately (?), this does get contributions out of both the "home office" budget and the "home computer" budget, so it doesn't have to be bargain-basement. Mostly, I just don't want to pick really stinky parts for the money, or miss something with a truly amazing performance-to-cost ratio because I only checked 100 review sites instead of 101. If the total tag ends up being a little high, I guess I'll just buy fewer luxuries in 2009. Fortunately, I'm above hand-to-mouth level and can afford that. I'm just not much above, as could be extrapolated from what I do for a living, so I don't want to buy a $2,000 doorstop. I've already got one of those.

The missing circuit is in your head!

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