Did I ask you for your love?Did I ask you for your dedication?
I don't want, I don't want your love.
I don't want, I don't want your affection!
Dateline, June 31, 2004
8 years ago,
to the month, I plunked down good money ($1600) for the old desktop. Call it Big Blue Dell. Despite its long service, I don't really harbor any emotional attachment. People love and make love to their computers, mod them, endlessly customizing inside and out, imbue them with personalities—only to chuck them out too soon when the newest shiny box becomes available. But to a writer, a computer ideally, should just be a typewriter. Sure, a typewriter with endless time-squandering fingertip access to a world of knowledge and social engagement, but a typewriter nonetheless. Means to an end.
But when you're on your own, business-wise, your box is not just a toy—it's your work, your productivity, your revenue generator. And when you're on your own, you have to be your own IT and IT training department. So no, I'm not a tech, I don't program or solder, but I've learned a bit about everything. Even when I knew far less, every upgrade I opened my wallet for has to run this gauntlet:
1. Is it going to make what I do easier, faster or better?
2. Do I need it now?
3. How soon can I afford it?
Most of my techno-fancies are felled by the first blow. Few survive all three. These are good rules. Abiding over all is the genetic predisposition to buy smart, agnostic and not very often. Modern technology and its advertising make this very difficult. Device manufacturers want you to buy early and often and that is how their advertising is geared. To build brand loyalty. When the bloom is off the rose and you want to find out how to keep older tech serviceable, well that requires some serious research skills.
I want a New Toy (oh ay oh), to keep my head expanding.
I want a New Toy (oh ay oh), nothing too demanding.
Then when everything is in roses, everything is static
Yeh my New Toy (oh ay oh), you'll find us in the attic.
Thank you Lene Lovich, but I am not a slave to tech fashion. While I appreciate striking industrial design, I don't give a rat's butt what "flavor" my case is. Slick marketing annoys me. I don't care what other people are buying or how cool they think they are when they buy it. Screw brand loyalty! Gimme bang for buck every time. I'm easily annoyed at people who find excuses to flash their toys around, thinking to impress others (Iphone users, this is particularly for you). Put it away already.
The market for hardware is mature, robust and well-plowed by the trade press. Metrics, bottom dollar and technical reviews move me, so I do my homework. I cut through the crap. This takes time, because when I do buy, I look to make quantum leaps in all the important metrics. If the old system had, say a 4G memory capacity, my new system had to have at least a factor of 5x improvement. My new one will have 32G, an 8x memory capacity improvement factor. The capacity of the HD was, but no longer is a concern anymore. When it was, I was regularly making jumps of 10x in capacity.
Though I'm the sort of guy who stands scratching his head in utter befuddlement at the open hood of a car and all thumbs when it comes to home repairs, I never hesitate to crack computer cases for hardware installs. In that respect, I'm a slightly updated equivalent of the greaser with the '57 Chevy. So permit me a whiff of nostalgia.
I greeted each of these milestones with a flush of exuberance.
- Kilobyte
- Megabyte
- Gigabyte
- Terabyte
My first very first desktop was a Zenith (two floppies, no HD), purchased in the spring of 1982. At the time, there was only weird, interesting but ultimately dead-end technology from Philadelphia-based Commodore, Osborne, IBMs, a handful of clones by Texas Instruments, Zenith and Apples. Not content to do simple word processing, I'd become the first freelance writer in my trade organization's history to edit and run the association's newsletter with a home computer. I celebrated in 1985 with a new HD on an expansion card. I think it had a whopping 3.2 megabytes. It was big and heavy and looked like a paddleboat oar.
By the time I purchased my second system in 1993, I went with a beefed-up Compaq. That box lasted an amazing 11 years. By them, I'd begun to refine my desktop purchasing philosophy which I summarized as "buy leading, but not bleeding edge."
2004
My 2004 workhorse system was a Dell Dimension XPS that came with a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 CPU, a whopping gigabyte of system memory and a capacious 80G HD. Feel free to insert your own ironic eye-roll here. The Dell came with a DVD player when they were just beginning to replace CDs. I pulled the "big" 125G back-up HD out of my old Compaq and slapped it in the spanking new system. I was good to go.
When massive ( >Tb) USB external drives cracked the $200 floor and my internal drives filled up, I purchased about 3 terabytes of expansion room for my backups, business files, photos, networked music, images, short stories, scripts, research, etc. … I don't think I'll ever fill all the space I have acquired, but I sure try.
Eventually I got all my document files out of my computer box and on to the blinking 3 USB drive array on my deskside shelf. I hope to soon get to a point where if the house was on fire, I could run to my office, pull one drive off the shelf and save all of what is precious to us.
May, 2012
I'd been eying a new system for a long time and all cards were on the table. When I make big purchases, I research, and research and research. I scan the reviews of publications I trust. I pour over cryptic data charts. I clip and make notes. I price compare. I assess my needs carefully and make some assertions based on where the technology is and where it's heading. Everything was on the table, gasp, even Apples!
In December, I'd landed a big project that kept me busy till this month. I'd sorta lied to the project manager when I told her that I had a big powerful desktop and didn't need to work in her company's office. The first part of this might have been true 8 years ago, but the Dell with its Windows XP had become leadenly, painfully slow. Internet and Windows Explorer crashed fairly consistently. Often, everything I clicked on brought up the ubiquitous hour glass and I became quickly but cumulatively aware of every second flushed away. Technology is perverse. It crashes in direct proportion to the importance of what you are working on.
When you perform a creative service, it's not your creativity that is the expendable item. Creativity is renewable. Time is not. Time IS money. Time is everything. And when it's your technology that slows you down, you really see the impact accumulate over days, weeks and months. I estimated that I spent between 10-20% of my time waiting for something to happen on my box. This is time (money) I'll never get back.
Next to Last Gasp
I knew what the problem was. At least I thought I did. Nearly a decade of Windows and Windows program installs had filled up the 80 G drive to the point that I had about 3% of drive overhead left, and this is after I moved everything off the C drive I could possibly move. IT people will tell you that Windows likes 20% overhead, wants a minimum of 15% to do clean defrags and complains bitterly with 10% and just plain chokes on anything less. I knew this to be true and at that point there were only two options. Buy new or make do. And I still wasn't ready to jump the broom with another system.
So, three weeks ago, I went out on a limb and downloaded a disk cloning software called XXClone. Even the research that went into this decision took weeks. After all, screw with your operating system and you're screwed. Learning and using XXClone took about two days of fiddling, but I voila, soon I had a perfect OS clone from the overcrowded 80G C drive to my 125G secondary drive. A new reboot presented an OS menu:
- Windows XP (old)
- Unknown OS (120G)
Last Gasp?
Last week a fan on Blue Dell went with a chunk, chunk, ca-chunk, grind, click. Rebooting caused BIOS message to strike F1 if I wanted to proceed at my own risk. This, I read as another sign, but not THE SIGN for THE PURCHASE DECISION. I cracked the case, measured the fans (90 mm) and for $24, bought 3 new ones from Directron, a very reliable retailer used by smart shoppers, modders and tinkerers like yours truly. The new fans came in 4 days. I cracked the case again and made the unfortunate discovery that Dell soldered proprietary pinout connectors on the motherboard.
Gasp!
Ah well. My $24 purchase had been in vain. I degunked the old fan and got it spinning again, but it failed again within 24 hours. This was, at last, the sign I was waiting for. As I write this, I'm running a utility called "Mother Board Monitor" which monitors the temperature of my CPU. It stands at a relatively cool 152 degrees F. When it pushes 190F, I power down. What a pain!
So this is what I went for. It's an HP Pavilion H8XT and my research told me that this was the best performer in the sub $2000 range. The high-end Intel processor and the fast video card were the major sell points. Here are the specs:
h8xt
- Windows 7 Professional [64-bit]
- 3rd Generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K quad-core processor [3.5GHz, 8MB Shared Cache]
- FREE UPGRADE to 8GB DDR3-1333MHz SDRAM [2 DIMMs] from 6GB
- 160GB Solid State Drive
- No secondary hard drive
- SAVE $40 on Microsoft(R) Office Home and Business 201
- No additional security software
- 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7770 [DVI, HDMI, DP & VGA via adapter]
- 600W Power supply
- FREE UPGRADE to Blu-ray player
- Wireless-N LAN card (1x1)
- 15-in-1 memory card reader, 4 USB 2.0 (front), 2 USB 3.0 (top)
- TV tuner, ATSC-NTSC with PVR, remote
- Beats Audio (tm) -- integrated studio quality sound
- Premium HP keyboard and optical mouse
- FREE Adobe(R) Premiere Elements & Photoshop 10 [$149 value]
As to the processor, it's Intel's second-fastest today. Or in that range. There are mid-range (over-clocked) gamer machines built with this chip, so it has some street cred.
Everything I've read says that solid state drives load the system and run programs up to 20% faster. But they may have to be tweaked. We'll have to see. SSDs are a fraction of the size of the massive 1 and 2 Tb platters that come with desktops and are ridiculously expensive in comparison. Yet I believe that they represent the new state of local OS storage. A little bleeding edge, considering that 160G seems a bit tight for all that I plan to load, programwise, but I'll be okay for awhile. I'll wait for the cost of these peppy little chippy drives to bulk up on memory and drop 20-50%, then I'll clone-up at some later date.
With tax, this system cost just shy of $2000. It isn't much more than I spent in 1982, 1993 or 2004. As always, I've taken a long time to deliberate and gather my facts.
When this system comes on 6/1, I'll pull the 120G hard drive from Blue Dell and put it in the new computer. Except for some utilities I've come to rely on, things I'll need to reinstall, I'll plug in the external drives and be good to go. Then, I'll wipe Blue Dell's OS and donate it to my son's school. I won't bat an eye or shed a tear. The one thing I've learned in thirty-some years of tinkering with computers that the boxes are interchangeable. The box software is interchangeable. What is yours, uniquely yours, is what you create and what you store.
Your brand. Your digital legacy. Memories. Hopefully archived in duplicate or triplicate.
So how long will this shiny new box last? I continually confound the experts on this subject, but in reality, I don't care. Soon, we won't need the box. I don't yet trust the cloud. What is most precious to me, I will always keep close at hand. So today I buy another box to access, edit and mostly add to my stuff. Will it be a good box? Will it be the last box? This will likely be the last bit of writing I do on this old box. It was mostly good while it lasted. Now ...
I got a New Toy (oh ay oh), to keep my head expanding .
I got a New Toy (oh ay oh), nothing too demanding.
Then when everything is in roses you don't get any headroom.
Yeh my New Toy (oh ay oh), you'll find us in the bedroom, yeh.
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