Upgrayed Pt. 1

When we left our intrepid hero..

I was kneeling sobbing, amidst piles of wires and case fragments. "It's dead, Jabs", Ben called casually from the couch sipping on grape Gatorade watching the latest Weeds episode. I'm kneeling here, sleeves rolled up with the wires and hard drives of my middle child laying around me and he's making Star Trek jokes. Assassination queue: +1. But he's right. I'm not getting this computer back together again and honestly, I don't want to. Too many of the components are too difficult to replace be it for price or availability, and I could use more oomph. Time to upgrade. But to what?

I've been here before. Time to shop, money to spend, and oceans of choices. I'm a firm believer in "The right tool for the right job". I don't get a 10-ton press when all i need is a tack hammer. Same thing for computers. I don't get the Quad Core Mega Awesome ULTRABLASTER CPU with 128 Terrabytes of hotRAM, if I'm not going to be singlehandedly completing the Colonization of Mars. It'd be nice to have all that power, but I built multiple machines for a reason. I tinker with a lot of projects and I like having a few different complete systems to share the load around. (also, when i totally blow it with one of my hair-brained schemes, I'm not totally screwed) So, what will i buy for this machine? First, Whats it goign to be doing? For a lot of people, its either Work, Home, or Super Face Melting Gaming Experience but for me, I need to expand on those topics. I do keep a modest computer for keeping up with emails and bills and news and such and I am a geek so I did build as much of a face melter as I could afford, but for work.. I cant have one single machine for "work". Between media storage and distribution , network tinkering, graphics and web page fiddling, etc.. theres a lot of concerns to keep in mind. For me, This new machine will be a new media distribution point. A new place to feed music, and video to my network. Which is good. Ive been meaning to upgrade the one I'm using and in doing so, I can build a dedicated network sniffer with the old media center. It's win/win , I'm bringing new purpose to an old box by building a new one.

Second, I do a salvage operation. What can I keep, What should I toss. DVD is a solid format not only for movies and stuff but for lots of data and has backward compatibility with CDs. If the DVD player works and you don't need to upgrade to a burner (and I don't) thats a no brainer. Keep it. The hard drives are kind of the same way, as long as their size is something you can deal with then keep them. I'm going to add storage to this computer, so ill be buying a hard drive, but really, I wont need much more than I've got. Which is good. I don't print my own money, so i try not to shovel it away when i don't have to. The CPU and Motherboard of this machine will have to go. For one they're bad, but also, the parts are older than i can replace reliably. If I decided to keep the motherboard and just do the processor, finding one would be a pain, id more than likely need to ship it to me. Same for the Ram that would go on the motherboard if i decided to keep *it*. All of that will need to be redone. I wont need much in the way of graphics, and quite honestly for what ill be doing I can probably find a motherboard with a graphics card , sound card, and network card built in. Thats a whole flock of birds with one stone and a bunch of crazy ricochets. So. Where to buy all this cra- er, equipment?

Stay tuned!