I have a new computer!

[Tdarcos]

I went to Micro Center Friday evening and purchased a Dell Optiplex 740. A 2.2 ghz 64-bit machine with 80 gig hard drive and 1 gb of memory. With DVD (reader I presume), refurbished off-lease, with 90 day warranty, for $199.99. Brought it home in my lap in my wheelchair, carrying it home on bus, metrorail train and bus.

I installed a number of open source applications including Firefox, Audacity, Inkscape, and then installed The Orange Box so I can do what I wanted, to be able to again play Half-Life 2, Portal, Garry's Mod and run Counter-Strike maps single user either in CS or Garry's Mod. (I know CS and Garry's mod are not part of Orange Box; I bought those later.)

There are a couple of really realistic looking third-party maps of the World Trade Center I have that run in CS so I can see more-or-less how it looked.

I was really disappointed I never got to see the place directly, because, ironically, our whole family was in New York City to see the original Coyote Ugly barroom, on Sunday, September 9, 2011.

I do like the fact Steam allows you to install the games you own on an unlimited number of machines as long as you're the only one using any particular machine for that account.

Best of all it uses XP Professional, not piece-of-shit Vista. Has 8 USB ports, but the one thing I don't like is it uses USB mouse and USB keyboard, I've found they tend to be less reliable over PS/2 connected mouse/keyboard.

But you actually still end up with 8 USB ports left without an extra hub because the keyboard adds two more ports, one you can plug the mouse into, so the net effect is you don't lose any.

Another reason for getting a (newer) computer is that I have an HD video camera I bought to replace my previous camera that did standard video. My old computer can't handle HD for video editing. Since the new one is a 64-bit machine it should be okay.

The speaker and microphone jacks are on both front and back, so I plug the speakers (Inland, $6.99), in the back and run them behind my monitor. I had to buy new speakers anyway, I knocked over the previous ones off my desk onto the floor and probably broke them. I've been suffering with headphones the last couple of weeks.

All of my MP3s are stored on an external hard drive so I can listen to them on this machine simply by moving the USB cable to this machine.

The (Dell) keyboard has additional small buttons above the function keys for controlling Internet Explorer, I presume (back, forward, stop, reload and home). It has a control for Windows Media player, with the mute, stop, previous track, next track, play/pause button, music button, and a volume knob. I kid you not, the volume control is an actual knob! (The HP keyboard I have for my Pavillion has volume up and volume down buttons)

About the only thing I don't like is the "six pack" typein control button set. On my Pavillion the keyboard is

Insert | Pause (break)
Home | End
Delete| Page UP
(two
button | Page DOWN
height)

On the Dell, it's
Insert | Home | Page UP
Delete | End | Page Down

Which means if you type by touch - I do - hitting the top edge on the HP gets end, on Dell it gets Page Up.

My Pavillion is supposedly slightly faster at 2.8 Ghz but I haven't noticed much difference. I put in a $14 USB wireless "chewing gum sized" adapter, installed the software and the Internet works.

The Dell and the Pavillion are both Tower models; the Dell is about 1/2 as wide because the DVD drive is mounted sideways but will allow you to insert the disc horizontally and it does work ok. The Pavillion has you mount CD/DVDs flat. (The Pavillion is about 8 years old, I think; I do remember that the drive is not the original one; I replaced a CD-R or CD-RW with a DVD writer. I have an external USB DVD writer I bought last year so I don't have to do that again.)

The Dell is designed to operate either horizontally as a desktop or vertically as a Tower. The HP apparently only operates as a Tower.

I am using the new Dell computer to post this message.

I have a KVM switch in the back of the closet I haven't used lately, I might hook it back up to switch machines on the monitor so I can use both simultaneously. On the other hand, both have wireless Internet and file sharing works, I could put the Pavillion over in the corner, have VNC server running and run it headless, when I need to use it for something, start VNC client and run it in a window.

That would allow me to remove the original keyboard and mouse off my desk.

So, anyway, basically that's what I did with the $200 I got last month for being an election judge in the September primary election. I've been wanting to play Half Life and the other HL-based games again for better than a year, ever since my other computer stopped working (and was stolen, another story.)

I have another $250 coming for being election judge in the General Election and taking the training class. I think I'll buy an all-in-one to replace the scanner I lost in the eviction. My laser printer is also informing me I'm running out of toner, which is probably about right, I bought it August, 2009 as a remanufactured model (for $79 with a a $30 mail-in rebate or $49 net), including a rebuilt cartridge advertised at an estimated 800 pages (about 90% of new).

It's a Brother laser, so I might look into something from Brother. This is the second of their laser printers I've owned, I more-or-less threw the first one away after about 4 or 5 years, when the drum started to go bad, and I suspect it was around the 3000-5000 page range. I've had very good luck with Brother, their prices are competitive and the TCO is in line with what they claim for toner and drum use. I might have kept the old Brother and replaced the drum like I did when the toner cartridge ran out, only the printer originally cost me $149 and a replacement drum is around $150; you do the math.

Then I discovered I could have turned the old printer in for store credit, I could have bought something else. Oh well, it's not important, I'd have lost it in the eviction anyway.

One thing it's a hell of a lot faster on is start-up time. When I start up the HP, and it gets to Explorer, showing the desktop, it still requires 20 minutes of initialization before you can use it; the Dell is basically ready to use within about 1 minute of the desktop appearing, and that's only because I have to wait for the wireless adapter to negotiate a DHCP lease with my firewall/router.

[Flack]

Congrats on the new machine! Coincidently, I just bought a new machine this weekend as well. I don't do a lot of PC gaming so I tend to get a lot of mileage out of machines, but the one I've been using for 4 years or so won't even play HD videos. It was maxed out with 2 gig of ram and was a single core machine. The new machine is approximately one bazillion times faster.

[Tdarcos]

Congrats on the new machine! Coincidently, I just bought a new machine this weekend as well. I don't do a lot of PC gaming so I tend to get a lot of mileage out of machines, but the one I've been using for 4 years or so won't even play HD videos. It was maxed out with 2 gig of ram and was a single core machine. The new machine is approximately one bazillion times faster.

I bought another 512 MB rod a few weeks ago which maxes out the HP as its limit is 1GB. I suspect the limit for this machine is 8GB. I was going to add 2 GB but I didn't have the extra $50; I had to put it back. I figured - correctly - that if I ran the HP on 512 meg, I should be able to run the Dell for now on 1 GB.

Half-Life looks nice. Actually the guy at the store talked me out of buying a slightly different machine of the same model which already had 2 GB but was $25 more, he pointed out that this had a better video system and if I'm targeting games it was probably a better choice. I suspect he was right.

[Flack]

Whenever people complain to me about their machine being slow, the first thing I have them do is add RAM. (Okay, second thing. The first thing I do is have them uninstall all the malware they have running ...) Especially compared to the old days, RAM is one of the best returns for your money. The average user can't tell the difference between 5400 and 7200 rpm drives, but double the RAM in a box and watch it fly.

In the "practice what you preach" category, with pretty much every machine I acquire, the first thing I do is max out the RAM. It doesn't benefit everybody, but if you (A) rip a lot of DVDs to DivX, (B) unrar a lot of huge files, or (C) do much video and/or audio editing (especially multitrack stuff), RAM is invaluable. In today's world where a gig of RAM costs less than a pair of Keds from Payless, it's a no-brainer.

As essentially a non-PC gamer, I tend to be able to get by on stock video cards. 99% of the time, even the on-board video is enough to get me by. The one exception was my current/last machine, which was so old that the on board video didn't support wide screen resolutions. To make matters worse, it didn't have PCI-E slots, only PCI, so I had a hard time finding a PCI card that did newer resolutions. Finding one wasn't expensive (I think the one I settled on was about $30), it was just finding one that was a pain in the ass.

Next up ... what to do with the 3 IDE drives in my old machine. New machine ... SATA only.

[Garth]

I recently upgraded too. From half a gig to 2 gigs of RAM [the max my system will allow]. Next up is to disable my onboard video and throw a real graphics card in there that has its own RAM instead this shared video memory crap. :P

I too had been waiting forever to be able to finally play HL2. I bought it as soon as it hit the shelves and it has been collecting dust ever since then. Now I can play it, but probably due to my crappy old embedded ATI card it stutters alot at certain points like when you enter that first tunnel with the train tracks and that dude rolls that flaming barrel down the stairs. It seems to be a common problem a lot of people have had though. So I dont know if the video upgrade will actually fix that or not.

[Tdarcos]

Whenever people complain to me about their machine being slow, the first thing I have them do is add RAM.

Agreed, if anything will improve performance it's enough memory.

Another thing to do is fix/lock virtual memory. I like to set virtual memory to 2 or 4 x physical and make it fixed, so the OS doesn't waste time reducing the amount of disk space reserved for swap. Disk is so cheap that even if you had 8 GB of memory, leaving swap at 16 gig fixed makes more sense. I have a 180GB hard drive in my XP with 30 GB free and 1GB of memory, it is really a no-brainer to leave the swap fixed at 2GB. At least that seems to be the sweet spot; I've never actually seen swap go above about 1 1/2 if that, and more than 2x is wasting disk space.

(Okay, second thing. The first thing I do is have them uninstall all the malware they have running ...)

Oh yeah. But I'll tell you something, sometimes getting the "goddammit pay me" alleged anti-virus packages removed can be as difficult as removing some malware. Then there's malware disguised as AV.

Especially compared to the old days, RAM is one of the best returns for your money. The average user can't tell the difference between 5400 and 7200 rpm drives, but double the RAM in a box and watch it fly.

I remember the first time I ever bought memory. Was for an add-in board, was 2 meg, and it cost a whopping $400. Ah, the MSDOS days...

In the "practice what you preach" category, with pretty much every machine I acquire, the first thing I do is max out the RAM. It doesn't benefit everybody, but if you (A) rip a lot of DVDs to DivX, (B) unrar a lot of huge files, or (C) do much video and/or audio editing (especially multitrack stuff), RAM is invaluable. In today's world where a gig of RAM costs less than a pair of Keds from Payless, it's a no-brainer.

As essentially a non-PC gamer, I tend to be able to get by on stock video cards. 99% of the time, even the on-board video is enough to get me by. The one exception was my current/last machine, which was so old that the on board video didn't support wide screen resolutions. To make matters worse, it didn't have PCI-E slots, only PCI, so I had a hard time finding a PCI card that did newer resolutions. Finding one wasn't expensive (I think the one I settled on was about $30), it was just finding one that was a pain in the ass.

Next up ... what to do with the 3 IDE drives in my old machine. New machine ... SATA only.

Unless you need to boot from them, you have three options. (1) Buy a $20 USB-IDE external case for each one, and run them as external removable drives. It's not a bad choice for anything up to 250 GB at that point you can buy a new one for few dollars more; you also have the advantage you can use the drive as a backup device. (2) see if you have an older computer, install them there and enable sharing, then use them as SMB shares from the other computer; if you aren't using it you can always just plug it in, connect it to your router and run it headless as a file server (I'm planning to do that with my XP machine once I finish resetting it and copying/installing anything I have to keep locally). (3) wipe the drives and donate them to a school or computer training facility for kids or the unemployed where the extra disk space could help them.

You could, if you have the room to keep them both around at the same spot, buy a KVM switch and use one mouse, keyboard, monitor and (for some models) speakers. Not very expensive for 2-4 computers, usually around $25 or so per machine. I sometimes have programs that will run on one computer but not another; a number of games my sister had would work on Windows 98 or ME but not on Windows XP. Since she didn't need both I simply rebuilt her hard drive so she could dual boot, otherwise I'd have kept both computers and included a KVM.

We did it at one office because they had a critical app that would run on DOS 5 or 6, but not on DOS 7 (the underlying MSDos version for Windows 95 on up). So the woman had both machines under her desk, with a KVM to use as needed to switch between them.

[Tdarcos]

I am considering buying another computer after having this one for 14 months because Duke Nukem Forever wants at least a dual-core 64 bit machine; I'm posting a message on Caltrops soliciting advice.

http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?acti ... pid=144287

[RetroRomper]

The 6550D is an integrated APU graphics chip (the A8-3800 is a Llano CPU / APU package from AMD) and neither the CPU nor its integrated GPU received rave reviews: your paying for a graphics "card" slower than a mid range 5670 from two or three generations ago.

If you can budget it and don't mind the task of building your own, I'd use this guide as a reference: http://techreport.com/articles.x/21876/2 This will also let you spread the cost of the system over a period of time and you'll be able to cannibalize components (mainly the hard drive) of your other systems, bringing the cost down even lower.

Spend a little extra on more RAM (16 gigs is dirt cheap right now), and you'll have a system that will likely be able to play anything at medium settings for the next five to six years (at least), plus anything pre-2011 at high or ultra (except for Crysis / Crysis 2, obviously).

Considering your giving into the upgrade itch to play a current gen game, paying for a mid range system that isn't currently and won't largely be obsolete in half a decade, may save you money down the line as that one "must have" title is released either next year or the one after.