New Computer Possibilities - Part One

I bought my last computer in April 2004 but then sold it when I lost my job about a year ago. It was an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ with 512MB RAM.

I used Alex's old computer when I was living with him, it's a Pentium II 300MHz with 64MB of RAM (which I upgraded to 192MB for $10 ~ when else do you get to triple your RAM? The performance improvement is astounding ^-^). But since I moved back here, I haven't had a computer (save for the N800 I bought last month and Ryan's old Compaq Presario 2100 which I've sort of temporarily adopted).

I have about $450 worth of parts coming here in the next few days (Fri, Mon, Tues). Here is what I picked up:

• Case: Antec P180B $130
• HDD (boot): Seagate 7200.10 250GB IDE $70
• Wifi: Linksys WRT54GL $64
• UPS: CyberPower Intelligent LCD 1350VA 810W $160

Case

I have heard many good things about the Antec P180. It is a heavy steel case but also has insulating plastic and foam (triple-walled construction) to ensure quiet. The main thing holding me back was not having the money to justify a case that wasn't scavenged and beige. Now they have a black version and I've heard that this is a later revision, very similar to the P182 (e.g. rubber grommets for water tubes). I want my computer to be as quiet as possible, the only sound should be my music.

Boot Drive

Now, 250GB seems like a bit much for a boot drive considering I don't use more than 4-6GB of it. However, until I buy a second hard drive (which will most likely be 500GB), it will be my only drive. I also have a *cough*burned*cough* copy of Windows XP I can put on there for games and such after I upgrade the rest of my system. However, Warcraft III ran fine under Cedega on my AMD (it's amazing how far Wine/Cedega have come in the past decade... God, I'm getting old...). Indeed, I could theoretically even put both XP and Vista on there as well as Debian or Ubuntu in addition to some games. For nostalgia's sake, I spent a pretty penny (>$250) on a WD 250GB HDD back in 2003, they were the largest hard drives available. Now, you can get a full TERABYTE for that much and this single platter drive doesn't even break $100.

Wifi

I also decided to go for the famed WRT54GL rather than an el-cheapo Wifi card / dongle. A couple of years ago, I bought a Wifi card at a retail outlet and couldn't get it to work under Linux so I returned it and got one that I knew would work. It took some poking with a sharp stick but it worked. Wifi under Linux is slowly improving but there are no standards, a plethora of chipsets (often you're buying blind) and few manufacturer release Linux drivers. Using the WRT54GL as a bridge solves that problem ~ I simply connect a short ethernet cable to the device and configure it via a web browser. Third-party firmware can enable the device to also act as a wifi repeater which may be useful for my N800.

UPS

This is my first time buying a UPS but I am spending the extra money for safety. I've had a power surge during a storm send components smoking (luckily nothing expensive and not the mobo). Now, I don't have to worry that expensive components will burn or hard drives will crash. I've already had my clock blink 12:00 last week and I don't want that to happen to my computer, since I'm the type that keeps it on continuously (although if I can get hibernate to work, I probably won't).