paul smith's Snaps & Bytes e-home
December 2002: Paul Smith - Commuter / Computer
I briefly felt flush enough to upgrade my PC recently. Which, for me, meant a new Motherboard (a rock-steady Intel D845PESV 'Silver Reef', which supports the lovely new P4 3GHz+ hyper-threading chips, for those of you of a technological bent) and a suitably inexpensive P4 1.7GHz to mount on it. I also sprang for 512Mb of DDR266 RAM. The DDR333 stuff only runs at 333MHz on this board if you use it with a 2.2GHz or higher 533FSB CPU. Handbooks are wonderful things, aren't they? Completing my U/G line-up was a fresh case'n'PSU and a 80Gb 7,200rpm drive from IBM that, unlike most other manufactures desktop drives, still wears a three-year warrantee. Many hours of toil with a screwdriver and bleeding knuckles later and the gutted carcass of my Compaq Deskpro (Celeron 600's will never go out of fashion, the salesman told me…) is ready to make a final appearance in my life on a card at my local Tesco.
Two days after this purchase, my thirteen-year-old base-spec. 1.1Ltr. Renault 5 blew-up when I attempted to drive it more than 30 miles in a single sitting. Being a bit of a grease monkey I tried to fix it, but many hours of toil with a screwdriver and bleeding knuckles later, I accepted that it was, in the parlance of our time, well fucked. So now I'm looking for a cheap new car, a little runabout to get me to work*. Indeed, the motoring equivalent of a Celeron 600 would do fine. I had, after all, been managing with a DX66 without PAS, EW, ABS, CL or FSH.
The two experiences, of buying a PC and buying a car, would appear to be very similar, and I don't just mean dealing with all the acronyms and slick and/or suspicious-looking salespeople. I mean you want to get as many practical features as you can, in an attractively styled package. You want performance at an economical price. You want quality after-sales support from your chosen supplier. You want it to play CDs, take you shopping and to have plenty of (down)load space. And you'd like it in a colour that doesn't show the dirt too badly. You're concerned if it seems noisy, worry about overheating, like a rigid galvanised chassis and grudgingly accept stupid levels of depreciation, especially if you own a Rover. The parallel falters when you consider that a Big Boot is desirable in a car but a ruddy pain when it's AOL kicking you in the bauds.
I wonder what the equivalent of kicking a cars tyre is when you're system shopping? Is it tapping the Caps-Lock key repeatedly to make the Caps-Lock light flash in a satisfying way? Speaking of which, my new PC case has banks of little blinking lights. I don't mean they've annoyed me. They just blink. One final thought: If Microsoft(tm) made cars, would they keep crashing?
*Like an adventurous-yet-hard-to-satisfy lover, I'm still looking for the ideal position, so please e-mail your exciting job offers to me at: Info@snapsandbytes.co.uk.
482 words on where the worlds of IT and GTI touch, Dale. If you hate them, let me know quickly and I'll have something new for you ASAP.
Regards,
Paul