Would I Lie to You?

[jackofallgeeks]

So, I've been trying to find $1200 to build a new computer. Because Oblivion is out. The game i've been watching for the last 18 months. You know, the new Elder Scrolls game? The follow-up to Morrowind? The latest bit of that series I've been playing since Arena launched in '94.

Anyways, UnicronPrime is showing her age. She can't run Oblivion. She can't even upgrade to be able to run Oblivion. And as her drives are being filled to capacity these days, her time is coming. Before long, she'll be little more than storage, and eventually not even that.

Maybe I'll scrub her clean and give her to my brother. She might get a few more years of life then, maybe. It's sad to watch and old friend fade away.

So right. Building a new computer. I think her name will be Annie. Just toying with that idea, we'll see. Her specs make her roughly twice as powerful as UnicronPrime in almost every way. But her specs were coming out to $1200. And I could do that, but it'd hurt a little. And I just managed to get her specs down to just under $1000, without losing much capability (none, for most intents and purposes). And, oddly enough, I can justify a $1000 computer more readily than I can justify a $1200 computer.

And now I have $200 I've already mentally allocated.

I'm probably going to order this machine this weekend and be playing Oblivion before the end of the month.

I should be doing more constructive things. Like my homework.

Comments

[photoholic62.livejournal.com]

I too, am saving up for a new computer. I don't know the specs ... just not good at that stuff ... but I have a computer guru who will build it for me. It's only going to be 600 bucks though, thank goodness. I'm saving for it by stashing bills under my keyboard. Really! If I have some ones left at the end of the day, they go under the keyboard. The other day I gave Daisy 10 bucks when she was going out with a friend. She didn't use any money while she was gone, so she gave it back to me. (She's a good kid!) It went under the keyboard. Whenever guru stops by for a hug to look at one of the computers, he gets whatever has collected under the keyboard. The tally goes in a word doc, cuz I cannot grasp Xcel. It's a good system, although as you can imagine, it has taken a couple of months, but I'm almost there! When the new one is built, all the parts from this one (which is already the best machine in the house. Blame Photoshop! That's why I keep my machine upgraded) all the parts will 'trickle down' to all the other computers, so everyone will have a mini-upgrade.

Why did I feel you needed to know this tomb of knowledge? No eye deer.

Good morning Andrew!

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Good morning, Dawn.

Yeah, it's crazy how inexpensive decent computers are getting. If I wasn't building a new gaming Machine, I could probably knock several hundreds of dollars off of my box. Since I am, though, I'm paying for a $200 video card, $100 or so in RAM, and a $200 processor. I imagine that if one just needed a new box without any bells and whistles, you could probably build something decent for, oh, $300 maybe $400 dollars, just off the top of my head. I find this amusing, and the first computer I bought (Unicron before the move to UnicronPrime) was a $1400 machine. And UnicronPrime was about a $1200 machine. And now Annie is going to be a $1000 machine.

[photoholic62.livejournal.com]

Yep, they get cheaper all the time. Our first computer ever was about $1200. We only just last year stopped using the last part from that machine. We are SUCH re-users! My computer needs to run Photoshop with ease ... a memory hog ... and my favorite game The Sims 2, which requires a better than average video card.

This is what my guru said:
For example, my machine I have now was $230 plus tax and shipping ($276) and it still came out cheaper than Fry's' in store price. Then I added a 200GB hard drive ($69 after rebate), and upped it to 1GB of RAM (About $100), plus $130 for a good video card, so it came up to about $580, but I did spread that out over several months. I really don't think it can be done any cheaper than that. An equivalent system from Dell will run you about $1100-$1200.

He is going to build me that same machine, with a sims 2 compatible video card. I have a 60 gig hard drive now, figured I'd never need anything bigger. Oops. The thing is, Photoshop needs a huge scratch disk ... empty hard drive space .. to run. Over time, mine is getting to full. It's not pics and stuff I save either, I keep all that stuff burned off. It's program files.

I haven't gone so far as NAMING my computers though ... hmmm....

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my current computer has a combined 180GB of memory which is slowly-but-surely filling to capacity. A good amount of the information on there I'm sure I never use, but it's such a mess after four years that it's hard to disentangle. "If it's easier to move than to clean up..." as they say. My new computer promises to have a 250GB hard drive (and the ability to add another drive later on when that ceases to be enough) and though I'll move a great deal from my old computer to the new one (songs, pictures, etc), I won't be moving nearly all of it.

-laughs- I name everything. My car (Margaret), my bike (Miriam), my computer (UnicronPrime since the upgrade), my flash drive (Grasshopper), my mp3 player (Nightingale), my hard drives (Motherbrain and Kraid), my hard drive partitions (Ridley and Hindbrain, both on Motherbrain)... I name everything.

Some cultures believe that to name a thing gives one power over it...

[photoholic62.livejournal.com]

I named my kids, does that count? Oh, and the dog! And the kids have named some of the fish.... I just can't remember all those names.... 8^)

Yeah, it says he added a 200 gig hardrive, not sure what it will have in total. I try to keep my machine clean. I uninstall programs I don't use, and get rid of all the leftover files I can find. I obssesivly (er, that doesn't look right) run 2 antispyware programs, hdvalet, norton windoc and defrag. I burn my photos and graphics off on a regular basis. But, there is just more and more cool software out there that I can't live without, so things get packed pretty fast. In another email later I wondered if 100gig of ram would be enough. He said we'll be able to add more later. That's the problem with the box I have now, it can't be upgraded anymore. Not sure how it works, but I guess there is only so much space, or so much a motherboard can handle, and this one is maxed.

I have NO music on my hard drive, to which my guru says "Dawnie, you just ain't livin'!"

I have enjoyed this conversation with you, over stuff I know very little about. Some day we'll have to talk about baking, or creating graphics or something I know at least a little about....

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I won't have much say in the naming of my kids; combined with the previous cultural reference, this raises interesting questions. But I may be wrong, my wife may be the kind sort.

-laughs- I get the impression you think I'm arguing points with your guru. Just for the record, I'm not.  :p  I'm sure he's perfectly capable. But just because you share your favorite new cake recipe doesn't mean you think your friend's cake recipe is no good. Well, not necessarily so, I guess.

I really should burn my photos to discs, but I like having them instantly accessible; if they were in a spool somewhere and not on my hard drive I'd never look at them, and that'd make me sad. And while I can't not have my music available on the machine, there's a whole gob of songs that I think are either repeats or bad copies, and I just haven't gotten around to weeding through them. So, there's a lot of that which won't be coming off of Unicron.

And though I like to imagine there's not really much of anything I can't talk about, I think Graphics might be my weakest subject. We could go down that path sometime, if you wanted to feel you had the upper hand.

[photoholic62.livejournal.com]

Oh no, I never ever got an inkling you were disagreeing with my guru or anything like that. In fact, I had the idea that we all agree this will be a good enough machine for me. At least until the "bigger/better/faster" bug bites me again in a couple years. I knew you would agree with him about the music!

In a good year, I fill up 6 to 8 DVDs with my photos. Just no way to keep them all on my machine. I do have a file of favorites that stays on here though, and a nice little slide show program....

I thought about it later. I only named Daisy. (Although Jeff did agree with the name) Daisy and Jeff named Melody. The dog was already named when she came to live with us. The kids named the fish. ::sigh:: I have no power! Ahahahahahaa

Actually, I tend to enjoy conversations more when I don't have the upper hand. I learn more, listen more and talk less. All good stuff. If I can ever help you with graphics though, you know how to find me.

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Well, now that you mention it, I just took a "Computer Graphics" course here at school. In actuality, it was specifically about 3D graphics, ray-tracing and lighting models and rendering and stuff. Really, the only application I can conceive of for that sort of thing is video games (and a "training simulation" is just a fancy word for an 'official' video game), but he seemed to think there was much, much more that could be done with it. -shrugs-

Thing is, I'm not sure I know what you do with graphics, or even what you mean by 'graphics.' I presume you aren't in the business of rendering scenes, ne? Is most of what you do the standard sort of 2D things one might think of for web pages and the like? what is it you do?

[photoholic62.livejournal.com]

I have not ventured into the world of 3D. At least not yet. The kind of thing you are talking about sounds like the sort of things they use in making simulations (aside from game usage, of course.) Like weather catastrophe simulations, or "what would happen if this car hit that truck at a high rate of speed" or "just how much damage can a bomb in a locker cause" kind of work. Also, more and more architects and engineers are beginning to use these types of 3D programs. Crime scene speicalists use that type of software also.

Me? I make web graphics, and I do photograph repairs and/or manips. Like, have you seen the pic that went around the net here a while back of a shark jumping out of the water trying to get a man who was dangling on a rope from a helicopter? I can do that sort of thing. I prefer to just take a bad photo and make it better, or to do the web graphics though. Someone on my flist yesterday posted a dark pic of a sleeping baby taken with a camera phone. I took that image, and brought out the details so you could actually see the sleeping baby's face, rather than just the general shape of a baby. When I was done, you could even see the red, rosy cheeks.

A client once sent me a very old photo with crease lines, and some tears and stains in it. I digitally removed the damage to restore the photo as closely as possible. It was a family heirloom kind of pic. That kind of work is really challenging, and this is an area where I wish I had actual training instead of just "learn as you go" type of process. I couldn't make it perfect, could only make it better.

That's the kind of thing I mean ...