Computer Upgrades

I mentioned a few weeks ago in this blog entry that I had purchased a Creative Zen Vision, a portable media player like the iPod Video, but with a bigger screen.

Well, when I tried to convert one of my DVDs to an AVI file, I found that it took a REALLY REALLY LONG TIME on my old Dell GX60.  The GX60 is a very small business-class desktop machine.  It had a 2ghz Celeron processor and 512MB of ram.  Not much but it had always suited my needs.

Well, video compression is the single most difficult thing you can ask a computer to do, and so the purchase of the Zen Vision made me decide I need a new computer.

Good excuse, eh?

I found a company up in Canada that was selling dirt cheap systems at www.btecanada.com.  I bought a basic system from them - Pentium D 3.0 ghz (dual core processor), 1 gig of RAM, a 200 gb hard drive, on board audio, video, and ethernet, all shipped for about $500 US.  A similarly configured machine through Dell would've cost me $1400.  Through Intrex, it would've been $1200.  Through Tiger Direct, about $800.  So yeah, it was a good deal - even though the hard drive was a refurbished hard drive, I didn't really care.

On top of this, I ordered a brand new Maxtor 200gb SATA hard drive so I would have plenty of storage space, and the SATA hard drive is faster than the IDE hard drive my computer came with.

Today, I added two more 512MB chips, taking my total memory to 2 GB.

And finally, I ordered a video card and TV tuner from BTE with money from my paypal account.  I got the ATI All In Wonder Radio X800 XT, an 8X AGP video card with 256MB of RAM.  Top notch!  Built in TV tuner, comes with PVR software and everything so I can do all kinds of crazy stuff.

And for the first time since I owned my Commodore Amiga, I've got a desktop PC capable of some SERIOUS gaming.  I don't even know where to start!

Can anyone recommend a good shoot-em-up game?  I always liked Doom II.