Saturday 3 November 2007

Pic of the day: The North Corporation computer is ready for the computer graveyard living room. (Because it is much colder there in the winter, a broken fan is unlikely to cause any harm.)

Time for a new computer

The fan on the black monster computer died again. Luckily it is winter, so opening the side panel that faces the wall keeps it at an even 37 centigrades, roughly human body temperature. That is good enough - the fan kicked in at the transition from 39 to 40, and the noise is not distracting. But the fan is placed by the power supply. I suspect this will lead up to another exploding power supply, like last Xmas. So it is time to get the replacement ready before the monster goes in for repairs.

Dell's new model lineup does not let you choose a fast computer without expensive everything else. Sorry Dell. I loved you but you just made yourself too hard to get.

The Norwegian web shop Multicom has an awesome low-cost Quad. So had Komplett.no, which I know better, but theirs happened to disappear over the last week or so (since last I checked their site). So, Multicom is the only place I can find what I look for. The 380 W power supply is just begging for an explosion though. Even 450 may be scraping it. But since the test machine did not explode during testing, hopefully this will work until I up my standards again.

The real headache is whether to pay extra to get XP instead of Vista. I lean in that direction. "My XX does not work with Vista" seems to be one of the most common computer related complaints I see online. Of course, a couple years from now it is more likely to be "My YY does not work with XP", but by then I am probably buying a new machine. Also by then hopefully Wine will run The Sims 2, or sourceforge is listing an open- source people simulator, whichever comes first. (Remind me to rave about Freeciv soon.)

This entry first appeared on my LiveJournal.