Smarty Pants Taji

Good Morning Readers,

Today I speak of a small adventure I had last week. My trusted home computer, which my wife uses to chat with her friends and family abroad, and which my daughter watches some of her Barney shows on, tragically died.

I bought this specific PC in 2005. It was an AMD Athalon64 3500+ that might not mean much to you but at the time it was a decent enough single core computer. Since then multicore PCs have become the norm and the world has moved on.

Now the general rule of thumb for these things is that if you want to stay up to date then you have to change your PC every 3 years… Well the PC kept chuggin and I couldnt find a reason to replace it. If it aint broke why fix it? Well one of the issues that kind of made me want to replace it a few months back was the fact that it sounded like a tornado. Egypt is a dusty country so its very hard for you to keep dust out of the vents and the fans.

The PC had cost me about $1100 USD and I had bought 80% of the parts through amazon.com back in 05. I assembled the pc together here with a friend (It was the first pc I ever put together… or at least helped put together). And since then I only upgraded the ram and added a silent fan or two.

Well it’s time had to come… and it was the Thursday before last. We came home from visiting my parent’s house and we found the computer and the main hard disk had fried themselves. I tried to resuscitate but the body was dead and the rigor was setting in.I felt like I lost a good friend that day. I kid you not.

Fortunately I had passed by a guy a few months back in the mall next to our house and the guy there seemed like he knew what he was saying… He made some recommendations… and I asked for the biggest meanest pc that I could buy for a certain budget in cairo. I asked him to write the price break down on a piece of paper and then I took it and left… I kept the matter in the back of my mind and figured if the pc kept chuggin along I could upgrade it middle or end of 2010.

Alas its time came earlier than expected and that forced my hand… I went to the guy and ordered my PC. I couldnt afford the biggest and meanest… but I ordered the next best thing… the Same computer but with the capability to upgrade it to be the biggest and meanest.

He said it would take a day or so to get the parts and assemble them… And then I can pick it up.

I had planned to also use this PC to do some voice over work… Alas one small detail escaped me. With Great Computing Power Comes Great Computing Cooling requirements.

What I bought was an AMD Phenom II 955 Quad Core Black Edition PC with 8 gigs of Ram. Running Windows 7 (64 edition) . And to top all that off I put it in a Cooler Master case called the CM 690 (you can google all this stuff and take a look at it).

Needless to say … this is not the kind of rig that is whisper quiet. This is a Monster PC with Monster capabilities that, although it does make less noise than my previous PC, is capable of making more noise if the processor is doing some number crunching.

Now when the old PC kicked the bucket… I figured I could use my VO laptop as a replacement until the new rig was ready for the family to use. The laptop was completely silent. In fact… it was so silent that sometimes I would go out and look at the screen just to make sure it was working. And it was.

Of course my laptop does not have a Quadcore AMD phenom II 955 processor in it… so it is not surprising that it was quiet.

The New PC is home now… They tell me its great for gaming… and video processing… not so good for audio recording … unless I move it to the other end of the house… it is good for Audio processing and editing so not really a total loss.

Not that I think of the new PC as a loss anyway.. I mean the thing is awesome… It’s fast, good looking and can run all my family’s media center needs… and work well as a design computer (since I also do freelance graphic design work) and works well as an all around work mule. I figure if it lasts me another 5 years like its predecessor then I’ve got my investment back…

And in the meantime… I will continue recording my VOs on my laptop.

RIP Athalon64…. RIP