When I left Time Inc. in 2007, I built a new computer from parts purchased at Newegg.com. Over the years, the parts gradually broke: some of my memory was DOA, the video card went bad, the power supply died, and the back fan broke. Finally, a couple of month ago, the last of three hard drives decided to kick the bucket. (This was probably related to the back fan breaking.) I decided to buy a new computer; I’ve very happy I did. The new machine has some pretty great components:
- GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD4-B3 LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 This is one of the newer motherboards on the market.
- Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) This is a quad-core CPU. With hyperthreading, it appears as eight cores.
- Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1 2.5″ 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive I purchased two solid state drives. They run cool, make no noise, and are quite fast for random IO operations.
- G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) The 16-GB kit is more expensive than two 8-GB kits, but it is tested and guaranteed to work together.
- Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB I also picked up a hard drive from Amazon–fast free delivery. The drive is for photos, music, and backups. I can’t believe a 2TB drive is under $80.
This is a pretty great machine. It takes less than a minute to fire up a web browser from when I turn on the machine, and I haven’t had any real issue at all.
A friend of mine at Microsoft used his employee purchase plan to get me an affordable copy of Windows 7 and Office. I also purchased an upgrade to the latest and greatest full version of Photoshop. I’ve installed all sorts of developer tools, and I’m looking fun to playing around with new applications at home.