When I picked up my two sticks of Ram from my local Best Buy, because the store cannot alter an online order, nor give me a refund for the overcharged sales tax, the manager sold me the Ram as if my order never existed. He honored the online price and gave me $5 off, which was the sales tax on the two items. I just had to cancel the order when I got home, which I did, and in the comments section I made sure to mention how upset I was with the CSR I spoke to who couldn't communicate with me, and who couldn't resolve my problem, and who wouldn't transfer me to someone who could.
We ended up picking up a couple of other things while we were in the store. Liz had been complaining about how noisy the fan in the new PC was, because her old PC had a super-quiet fan, and I guess it was, because Liz noticed the new one, so I got a tube of thermal grease, necessary for replacing/changing over heat sinks. I also saw Age of Empires III. Liz said she was getting bored with AoE II and wanted a new game so this was perfect timing.
Back home I opened up the case for the new PC and was amazed again at just how compact they had made it and still got everything inside. Of course it helps that practically everything inside is built into the motherboard, but, you still have a hard drive, a CD Rom, a 3.5" floppy drive, and a power supply (just about the biggest thing in there) all tucked into the tiniest of cases. The hard drive is actually mounted in a bay which runs horizontally across the case, rather than being mounted in the usual manner, i.e., front to back like the CD Rom. In order to change over the hard drive I actually had to remove the entire hard drive bay, not just the hard drive itself. Well, in order to replace the fan and heat sink, I actually had to take out the power supply. This probably means nothing to anyone who hasn't cracked a PC case before, but this is not SOP for replacing CPU fans & heat sinks.
This is akin to shoe horning a 5.0 litre V8 (about a 308 to you imperialists ;) into a Mini Cooper S. We're talking about getting stuff inside an area where it technically fits, but has never, ever been in a space that small before. The economical use of limited space is just sheer genius, although it does make working on those things a real bitka (no offense, Bitka, I just had to throw that in ;).
Fortunately Liz uses her PC for surfing, doing our finances, and playing AoE II (now III) so what she has now is pretty much going to get the job done for a long time. About the only other upgrade I'd consider is a real Video Card. Her onboard card is using 64Mb of the 512Mb of Ram I dropped in, which makes it an average card by industry standards, but it's not a real 3D card. Not that she needs one, but, it would be nice for her to have a dedicated 3D card, so, I might have to buy one and drop it in for her, and then she'd have everything she needs. AoE III should run on her system, but, it may want a real 3D card too, so I could be cracking her PC once more in the very near future.
We ended up picking up a couple of other things while we were in the store. Liz had been complaining about how noisy the fan in the new PC was, because her old PC had a super-quiet fan, and I guess it was, because Liz noticed the new one, so I got a tube of thermal grease, necessary for replacing/changing over heat sinks. I also saw Age of Empires III. Liz said she was getting bored with AoE II and wanted a new game so this was perfect timing.
Back home I opened up the case for the new PC and was amazed again at just how compact they had made it and still got everything inside. Of course it helps that practically everything inside is built into the motherboard, but, you still have a hard drive, a CD Rom, a 3.5" floppy drive, and a power supply (just about the biggest thing in there) all tucked into the tiniest of cases. The hard drive is actually mounted in a bay which runs horizontally across the case, rather than being mounted in the usual manner, i.e., front to back like the CD Rom. In order to change over the hard drive I actually had to remove the entire hard drive bay, not just the hard drive itself. Well, in order to replace the fan and heat sink, I actually had to take out the power supply. This probably means nothing to anyone who hasn't cracked a PC case before, but this is not SOP for replacing CPU fans & heat sinks.
This is akin to shoe horning a 5.0 litre V8 (about a 308 to you imperialists ;) into a Mini Cooper S. We're talking about getting stuff inside an area where it technically fits, but has never, ever been in a space that small before. The economical use of limited space is just sheer genius, although it does make working on those things a real bitka (no offense, Bitka, I just had to throw that in ;).
Fortunately Liz uses her PC for surfing, doing our finances, and playing AoE II (now III) so what she has now is pretty much going to get the job done for a long time. About the only other upgrade I'd consider is a real Video Card. Her onboard card is using 64Mb of the 512Mb of Ram I dropped in, which makes it an average card by industry standards, but it's not a real 3D card. Not that she needs one, but, it would be nice for her to have a dedicated 3D card, so, I might have to buy one and drop it in for her, and then she'd have everything she needs. AoE III should run on her system, but, it may want a real 3D card too, so I could be cracking her PC once more in the very near future.
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5 comments:
yay for 512 MB memory! :)
Sweet work hardware hacker. I'll have you coding eventually :-)
cap'n,
if you do choose a "real" card for liz grab an overclocked one from BFG Tech.
I was looking at the BFGs, because they use nVidia's GeForce chip. Liz's computer once had a GeForce card and from previous experience I know that switching between nVidia and ATI is a real bitka (heh heh, got to use it again :) so I'll probably get her the BFG 4000.
Neh switching tween ATI and Nvida cards isnt hard, its just that ATI always had unstable drivers.If liz has a p4 id suggest you get something from the geforce 5 or 6 range then liz could play some of the cooler age of empire type
of games... heh, reading this ive a 128mb geforce ti 4600 sitting on top of me pc after replacing it with a lovely BFG 6600 OC [$200 from newegg.com]
And if her pc has an agp slot in it get an agp card not pci and turn off the onboard graphics in the bios before install and do my taxes and make me rich somehow and while your at it dicover the cure for all disease and the secret of eternal youth,
regards,
ross.
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