Upgrading My Computers

Posted by santosj on March 15, 2006

First Computer:

Still need a Graphics Card, doesn’t have to have any fancy features, just one that is cheap and get the job done. If I buy an All-In-Wonder, then I’m setting myself up to use it as an tv.

I think I will just use this computer as a development machine and run it as a web server along with several choice applications for development purposes. I don’t know whether to have Linux and try to get applications to work on it or just use Windows and use Macromedia. The less applications I install, the less chance I have of screwing things up.

Second Computer:

I still need to buy a couple of 200GB hard drives, the first will be SATA. The next thing I need to do is get a higher wattage power supply for the next two 200GB hard drives. That would bring it up to 800 GB for storage or close to it.

Total for the Hard drives: $360. Reasonable price, and I’ll be able to buy as I need.
Total Cost for the PS: < $100. I want one that will last and not cheap out on me.

Everything else in the machine could be as it is. If I do opt in to having an ATI AIW (All-in-Wonder) for this computer, it would allow me to schedule tv recording tasks and I would have the space to store everything. It would need to record natively to MPEG4, both to save space and to save me time from doing it myself. Also, having a network share would also allow me to watch the shows on different machines. I am contemplating using Linux for this as the ATI has patches and drivers for Linux. If I can find a TV Tuner that allows MPEG4 builtin encoding, then I can install a TV program for managing the devices from music to sharing to scheduling like Tivo.

Third Computer

This is going to be dual core 64 bit AMD system for gaming and not so much for anything else. I think I will install Linux with Wine and the game software for running Windows Games on Linux. The specs will start off cheap for the simple stuff. At least I won’t have to waste money on minor components, such as the case, power supply, RAM, DVD-ROM to name a few. Those minor components will most likely be brought first and then when the time comes the major components will be brought: motherboard and processor, graphics card, sound card, hard drive.

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