McWilliams’ World

Man this sucks… My computer died on Friday. The screen would just go black. A reboot usually got it back up, but at some point it stopped booting. No beeps, no nothing.

Thinking it was my video card, I ran around trying to find an AGP based video card. Landing at a local PC shop I plopped down $70 and ran home to slap it in.  Nothing. I got the same results. The box turns on, the fans whir up but that’s it. Bubkis. I tried everything; re-seat the CPU, pull the memory, un hook everything… nothing.

My only thought was that it was either the motherboard or CPU. Digging around NewEgg.com, I discover that if I upgrade either one… I’m screwed. I’d need new memory, video card, etc… No point in blowing $300 for a band-aid.

I’ve built my own computer for nearly 15 years. I’ve never purchased a retail system. I’ve sold them and even had a very small custom PC business. It’s not that I didn’t like retail systems… I just liked getting my hands dirty. I like custom building stuff. But this time, I think the state of the industry caught up to me. It’s fine if you just need to swap out a component but when you’re dealing with the motherboard or processor, that’s major.

So I broke down and found a fairly decent Dell. We don’t game on it (that’s why we have 2 Xbox 360’s), but mainly web, email, music, video - pretty standard stuff). I splurged on a 22″ Widescreen Samsung LCD monitor (just like I did for my Mom when she bought her’s recently); something I was going to buy anyways once I got my $2000 in gift cards (whenever that  happens). I compared a few other configurations and this was probably the best of both worlds. I ended up blowing about $760.

So about a week or so I’ll have a band spanking new system. Money that I really didn’t want to spend - but life works like that… here’s hoping my tax return is hefty.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under Deals, Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.