Project of the Month

Okay, so it's not all that pretty, but like a lot of things, it ain't pretty but it's mine. A week or so before Christmas I told Jeanne that I probably needed to upgrade the computer I do all my video work on. Even the simple video I was putting together for the family for last years fun was slow and difficult. I have some money left in my old Signature Video account and I'll use that. I'll be doing some more video for the quilter down in St. George soon and she will pay me some for that, so I should be okay.

Jeanne, being the very clever girl that she is, figured that was perfect - that could be my Christmas. So when she told people what we had got for Christmas she told about her new HD LCD television for her sewing room and her new MP3 player from me, and oh by the way, Scott is updating his computer for Christmas. Yesterday was a day off from work and so I went and visited a few little computer stores around the area. The kind who have computer parts, not the ones that sell the factory made like HP and Dell. After talking to a few people, I decided to go with the Intel chip this time. so I selected a new motherboard, and processor, a new graphics card and RAM. Oh, by the way, the power supply in my old case is not powerful enough to handle all the new stuff so I have to have a new power supply. Oh. . . with the new motherboards and faster ram we have to use a new type of hard drive, now the connections have to be Serial ATA (SATA), so guess what, even though I have about 300 Gigabytes worth of Hard Drives in the old system, none of those are any good anymore and I have to get new ones. The good news is that all this stuff is lots cheaper than it used to be. Well at least cheaper per byte. So the nice young feller hands me a bid, including tax of only $652.92. That's only about $200 to $250 more than I was hoping for. It's sure a good thing I am planning on using my ugly old case and the current DVD ROM and DVD burner in it. Oh, and I found out I can use the firewire card that's in it too. Good news, though they only run about $20.

In 1995 I bought my first "PC". PC meaning it was one of the Intel based or Windows operating system computers. Before that I had had Comodore brand which was a totally different system. Fortunately I wrote about it in my journal so I went back and looked at it today. For just the computer itself - no monitor, no printer - I paid around $2000 and I got a computer that operated at a speed of 100 Mhz or about 1/50th of the speed of what I'll be upgrading to. (If that doesn't sound like much think of this - If you had a car that could travel at 100 MPH in 1995 and it increased by 50 times it would now be able to go in a straight line from Los Angeles to New York City and back to Las Vegas in one hour) The first one had 16 Megabyte of RAM this one will have 3 Gigabyte or about about 62.5 times the RAM. My original had a hard drive that stored 1 Gigabyte of data. This one will have about 800 times the storage (If your 1995 100 MPH car originally had a 20 gal tank it would now hold enough gas to make that same trip 3 times, even at 1 mile per gallon, without stopping). I guess I shouldn't complain about the cost.

I'm so glad that I also wrote the cost of memory at the time. As I said I had 16 Mb of RAM and it would have cost me about $45 per MB for additional RAM. At that price 1 GB of RAM would have been $45,000. Yesterday they wanted to charge me $29.99 per stick of 1GB which is $.03 per Megabyte. Not bad huh.

I came home after my shopping trip and spent a few hours on the internet (a strange new phenomenon in 1995) and got the price down (including shipping) to just barely over $400. AND OBTW - I'm getting better, faster RAM for $.01 per MB. - I'm sure glad I didn't invest in RAM waiting for the price to go up to sell.

Keeping my same case, DVD/CD ROMs and Burners and firewire card is also going to save me around $175 to $200. Well it's ugly but it's mine. We'll see how it goes on getting it installed and up and working.