My new toy

I’ve been busy for weeks and never had a good chance to sit and do some things for myself. Much had been allocated to work and some chores at home. And after so much of these, I decided to give myself a prize.

Though I have a working PC at the moment, which my uncle had let me resurrected from his pile of dodgy stuff, I just can’t get through to all of the things that I am currently working on. A 2.4 Ghz Celeron with 2 GB of RAM and 20 GB of disk space doesn’t do that much for my work and play, so, its about time to get things on a roll.

I’ve been contemplating for weeks on what to get on a budget. A computer freak like me had to take the ordeal on what I want to what I should get. Things like what processor to get, what motherboard to go with it, how much disk space should I get, how much RAM, wireless networking and display.

First, I just have to leave the display behind. I still got a 15” Colored CRT and an extra 15” display upstairs, which has been sitting for ages. That would be great on switching between tasks and PCs on RDP.

Second was the processor. As much as I love AMD, I just can’t deal with it in terms of doing a lot of tasks. A Level 2 Cache of 256k to 512k, would just make things worst on multi-tasking. So, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 was a great choice. It got 2.33 Ghz and a 4 mb of L2 cache. I guess, I just have to come back to AMD when I want a HTPC. A Sempron would be great on it.

Third was the motherboard. I love Asus and Gigabyte but what made me get the Asus V3-P5G333 barebone was its chipset. It comes with Asus P5K-VM motherboard with Intel G33 chipset with fast memory access technology. The case was also nice and got a lot of USB slots, card reader and front and back access to music and firewire. I’m pretty sure that it was carefully designed by Asus to make this thing a work horse. As I have read some of its review, it has been great with games and overclocking.

The rest was pretty easy. A stick of 2 GB RAM (PC-800), a pair of wireless Logitech Keyboard and Mouse, 500 GB SATA 2 hard drive, a lightscribe DVD writer and an entry level wireless router by Netgear.

So far, my new toy has been doing fine. I just have to transfer my files to it and configure my old toy to Windows 2003 SBS. My PSP is also happy communicating with my wireless network. I just have to get my Skype accessory to make some free calls.