My main computer downstairs (the one in my office) is a piece of crap Dell Dimension 3000 that I got off of Craigslist a couple of years ago for $200. It’s not the fastest machine in the house by far, but for surfing the web, reading e-mail, and performing basic audio/video/graphic editing, it works well enough.
Last year I splurged and bought myself a 28″ widescreen monitor. When I hooked it up, I discovered that the Dell Dimension’s integrated video card doesn’t support widescreen resolutions. Worse yet, the Dimension 3000 has a grand total of 3 PCI slots — no AGP, and certainly no PCI-e. Basically what that means is, the machine won’t support the current generation of video cards, or even the generation before that.
On Monday I received an e-mail from NewEgg with a list of their weekly specials. One of this week’s sale items was a GeForce 8400 GS video card. It’s PCI so it’ll work in my machine, and it was $30 so the price was right. Since I was going to make an order anyway I went ahead and picked up a couple of other items I’ve been wanting to get. The DVD burner in this machine works, but it’s old and slow. I was able to upgrade from a 4x DVD Burner to a 22x DVD Burner for another $30. I keep a list on my computer of things I want to buy via mail order, and once the list gets up to 3 or 4 things, I’ll place an order.
Shipping for both of those items plus 200 blank DVDs was around $8, and like most online stores, there was no sales tax. I placed my order on Monday, picked the cheapest/slowest shipping method they offered, and got my items today.
I just finished installing the video card and the burner, and am now burning a disc to try everything out. The video card works great, and I’m finally able to actually run my widescreen monitor in a widescreen ratio — woo hoo! In the time I typed this post up, I was also able to burn a dual-layer DVD — double woo hoo! It looks like I was able to breathe some new life into this old machine with just a few minor upgrades.
(Triple woo hoo!)
It’s fun to upgrade a computer… My iMac G5 died last January and I just recently replaced with an 5-year-old Dell tower given for free from my employer after they’ve upgraded our hardware.
I noticed that it didn’t have any FireWire ports, which I needed for my video rips (I have an old Pinnacle RCA-to-FireWire bridge). It just so happened that the store chain The Source (formerly known as Radio Shack Canada) had a 3-port FW card on clearance for $10. Lucky me, one of the Montreal stores did have it in stock, so I went and bought it (after having to explain to the salesclerk was is Firewire; he thought it was a wireless card, couldn’t find it in his computer till I gave him the SKU number from the website…).