I meant to post this post a while ago. Back when the details were fresh in my memory. So please excuse me if they are fuzzy or wrong.
This last Spring, I had two of my computers die on me – within 5 days of each other. That fucking sucked. One of those computers was the first and last Dell I will ever buy. Holy crap, Dell makes shitty computers. There I said it, and I am entitled to my opinion, however wrong it may be.
This was a Dell Inspiron 530. I had already gone through the pain of having a rather expensive graphics card die on me inside that machine, when the whole thing finally croaked, the motherboard AND the hard drive got fried at the same time. I also had problems with my monitor when it was plugged into that computer, so I believe I can lay the blame on the power supply.
But that computer was my “Music Computer” on which I edited lots of good tunage, so I sadly lost the work I had done on some music over the last two years or so.
Lesson: Backup, and backup some more.
Five days later, I went to play some old video games on a refurbished HP Compaq DC7700 which I picked up cheap. The motherboard on that had died too, as I figured from all the now dead USB ports.
The Dell originally cost me over $1500, and it lacked the Nvidia graphics card (should have opened it up to check before it was too late… thanks Dell) and firewire ports I thought I bought with it. Figure in that $300 or so graphics card that died and the $200 replacement later… and that’s an expensive lesson.
The HP Compaq cost me $189. I looked around for a replacement motherboard and found basically nothing except for an ebay auction for around $150 plus shipping and handling.
So I bought another HP Compaq DC7700 exactly like it for $189. And I realized that the dual core Pentium D is fast enough for all that I need that computer to do. I use MS Paint in Windows XP to letter my fembot comics, and I use a virtual installation of XP inside Lubuntu to run Cool Edit 2.0 for my music editing. It’s just as fast as my old Dell was, and my monitor doesn’t overheat any more.
So I learned a valuable lesson. And that is that my needs don’t require the latest and greatest computing power any more. I can use older or lower powered and therefore cheaper hardware for everything I want to do. I just wish I had realized this before I bought that blasted infernal Dell.