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This is one of the most common scenarios in today's middle-class America; that of the old family PC gift. There are literally scores of machine like this sitting in the closets, attics and garages of suburbia. They can be HP, Dell, Acer..... the brand matters little. They are very much like this one; 2, 3 maybe 4 generations old. They are consumer machines that sell by brand recognition and whichever is shinier/cooler looking than the others on the shelves of Best Buy and Walmart. These aren't bad machine, they're just limited and in today's world of 5th, 6th generation "Core" computers, they are basically "on their last legs". However, this is what one of my students brought in today. So lets take a look at it and see what we can do with it.
At the center of this machine is the LGA-775 and in it sits the Intel Core2Quad Q6600. This motherboard engenders some givens.
Four sockets that take DDR2 memory of 667Mhz spec. As typical of memory from this era, there's a chipset limitation of 8Gb total. It also means a full complement of 6 SATA sockets. Along with the obvious limitations, there are also some opportunities as well.
What about the most important part; the graphics sub-system? This machine came equipped with the nVidia GeForce 8500GT. For that day and age, it wasn't "bad" equipment. Far from it! But for today, it's barely adequate to run YouTube videos, but certainly not games of today. So.... what to do?
I would do this, in the following order:
- I'd start with the drive situation; buying as much SSD as my budget will allow. That'd probably something in the 256Gb range. Not huge, but big enough to hold a reload of the OS and the important software.This will do more than anything to make the machine run like something much newer.
- Then, I'd move on to this; a new graphics card. I'd do something along the lines of the nVidia GTX650, or an AMD equivalent. Something giving modern graphics ability, but not requiring additional power.
That's it. Really...... that's all I'd do. The machine already has 4Gb of RAM in it (occupying all it's memory sockets), so in order to add more, it would require losing at least 2Gb. I'll probably advise my student to not bother with the RAM unless he has extra money or happens to come across a great deal on 8Gb of DDR2 memory. It's really a pretty easy case. The hard part will be to save up his money to do a true full-on build!
It is 2016! We each have personal computers! Actually, I should say, "devices", since we all have more than one and they aren't all computers in the sense that most people understand them. There are 4 of us, and we all have at least one notebook (aka Laptop) computer, and one tablet. I'll get back to the "at least" part a little later.
In today's world, it's the notebook computer that's the typical product and it's the desktop that's a specialty item. Now that our children are at or close to teenage years, we all have uses for an actual computer. The last holdout was the daughter who started on a notebook computer playing games both online and locally loaded. But then, she went completely iPad oriented when she received her first one a couple of years ago. Last month, she announced to me that she intended on putting a "computer" on her Christmas List. I told her to take it off because, in our family, those are "regular use" items and not something special. WOW, what a different technological world a few years have made! Her reason was that she wanted to have her own Minecraft account, so didn't want to share with her brother! Anyway, that get's us to our current situation. We all have a "main" machine that we work on.
My son has gone through a series of various ThinkPads back to an IBM (!!!) ThinkPad A21p, many moons ago! Every couple of years, he's gotten an upgrade just as soon as somebody else upgraded from a machine that was too old and slow for their use. Of course, they've always been ThinkPads with the exception of my ill-fated foray into old gaming laptops first with a Clevo, that followed by an Alienware. Then, back I went, to the faithful ThinkPads, generally of 15" screen size because he mostly used them to play games on at home, till this the current school year when he started the 7th grade and needed to carry a machine back and forth. So, now he has a ThinPad X220 that's compact, thin, light and plenty powerful enough for doing PowerPoints, Google Docs and light research on the web..... oh, and the every-present "flash-games" that all middle school kids play! Minecraft has moved over to a "self-built" (me, not him) gaming box that got it's start from my brother sending an ASRock, Mini-ITX board populated with a second-gen Intel "Core" i5 processor. Eventually, it received my old third-gen i5 processor. Today, it does a nice job equipped with that, an Intel SSD, and an nVidia GTX 650 graphic card (so it can stream to nVidia Shield devices). More on that later as well. We have it hooked up to the new Sony 55" 4K TV in the game/media room.
His "personal" device, is the nVidia Shield Tablet. It has a nice 8" IPS screen, a powerful K1 Quad-Core processor and capable of streaming games from his gaming machine since that has certain level nVidia graphic card in it! He loves it when he's not "on restriction" from not keeping grades up to snuff! If you haven't read my earlier post on this thing, I'll go over the high-points quickly here. Other than the typical Android type things, and the game streaming that it can do, it also has a dedicated gaming controller as well, plus the capability to connect to an outboard monitor via HDMI and function as a "console". It's really a pretty slick concept and nVidia's execution is very nice.
On to the daughter. She, like her brother started her computing life via ThinkPads. In her case, custom (by Daddy) painted lavender, X31. That was replaced by a ThinkPad Z60t.....right around the time she got an iPad. The rest (the laptop too).... as they say; was history. That is, right up until last November, when she decided she needed her own machine so she could have her own aforementioned Minecraft account.
Then, she (I) got lucky! I had a friend who had a Sony VCPEH, a decent 15.6" screen "desktop replacement" of the "Sandy Bridge" Core generation. It was brought to me with an apparently dead screen/video sub-system to retrieve files. Indeed, the screen refused to light up regardless of what I did. However, it did output to an external monitor indicating the GPU was still good. They had already bought a new machine and didn't want the computer back after I got their files off. So it sat under my desk for several months then in a box due to our move to the new house. When I started looking into my daughter's request, it occurred to me that maybe I could just replace the panel on this Sony. This required me to take it apart so I could see the model number. When it went back together, the screen came back to life! This was followed by me digging into my parts boxes for more RAM, and a drive. So now she has an i5, with 8Gb of RAM, and a 160Gb Intel SSD. Like a certain overgrown elf, Daddy wiggled his fingers and made a computer appear.
Then there's my wife. And since I just recently wrote about her machine, I'll just quickly recap here. Several years ago, I talked her into a second-hand iPad (1st gen) because I knew of one I could get cheap. That was like 10 of these things ago! For me, they've been like the episode of the classic Star Trek, "The Trouble with Tribbles". They just keep multiplying! There is of course, her progression through the generations of these things. That was followed by the expansion into "kid territory" when the children were both elementary school age because Mom had them using apps to suppliment their school learning. All of that was part of the greater issue; that of her starting to use them in the classroom with her students. This grew into a full-scale conversion from a set of old ThinkPads to "older" iPads, and now to iPad Minis. We're up to 5 Minis (not counting my daughters) and one iPad2. Oh, and my wife is now on a 1st gen iPad Air.
Comparatively, her notebook computer progression is rather simple. She uses, mid-sized (15") ThinkPads. I typically get her something in the "T" Series, although, she's had "A"s, as well as "Z"s. We are how literally in the middle of moving her from a T500 to a T530. I've had SSDs in her machines for some time now. The newest machine has a 480Gb, Intel 2500 with 8Gb of RAM. Otherwise, the machine is unremarkable, but completely adequate for her needs. She hates it every time I do it, but I upgrade her about every 2 to 3 years as you can probably tell by the model numbers of the latest round. She swears it's more often, because I tend to reload her OS every year in between.
As for me; I just wrote about that issue a couple of days ago, so won't repeat it here other than to say that I'm going to talk tablets soon.
Inside my head, this is what my world has been like for about the last month! Of course, this all started when we left in a huge hurry (to beat a winter storm) for Disney back in March. I had just thought that getting that trip out of the way would be a relief..... Yeah; it didn't turn out that way. Naturally, there's the usual end of the school year stuff, such as state testing for the "end of course", then there was my AP class's "national exam", then other stuff such as prom, UIL Academic competition for which we qualified for regionals this year, our own kids' end of year stuff, all capped by yesterday's annual "International Food" day and the Computer Club's last game night! Makes me tired just thinking about it!
Oh..... Did I forget to mention that we are selling our house...... and obviously trying to find a new one right in the middle of all this? Yeah! We are! Which of course means that we are living in a house recently cleared of all the normal things that people have in their houses so that we can make believe that we normally live in a half-furnished house.
As if that wasn't enough; the last two months have been a constant flow of computer jobs for people with broken PCs, or needing new machines. At any given time, there are anywhere from 1 to 3 computers sitting here waiting for me to find time to fix or the arrival of parts.
Then, a month ago, we decided it was time to replace our 13 year old SUV. The old Trailblazer had served us well, but it was pretty much "fish or cut bait" time. Meaning that we either needed to spend a few thousand dollars to keep it for a another few years, or sell it to buy another vehicle. Obviously, by the picture, you can see that we sold it and bought a Tahoe instead. While you are scratching your head in wonder, let me give you my rationale on buying this land-yacht. We can start with, it's bigger and has way more capability, move on to that it gets several miles per gallon better than the Trailblazer (!!!) and only costs $2000-3000 more than the mid-sized SUV of today such as the Traverse/Acadia/Expedition. Yes indeed, these things do/did sticker at around $50K (about $55K for this one), but I bought this 2012 for just south of $30,000 with about 50,000 miles on it. I will at some point, write an entire post on this topic. Just not today! Pretty big deal, right? Why not go ahead and write on it?
I got a little distracted along the way! For those who don't recognize it immediate; this is nVidia's family of "Shield" products.
You might remember a couple of years ago that virtually any place that sold consumer electronics was overrun with advertisement material on this thing..... the nVidia Shield "Portable". I'll have to admit that it took me some time to even figure out that it was, although it was undeniably cool looking! At it's core, it's a full Android device; optimized for gaming with some really cool tricks, but still pretty much a tablet.... with an analog controller attached..... and a giant battery (28.8wh). Granted, the screen's only 5", but hey. Why this from an admitted "non-gamer"? Several things really. The technology is very cool! Not only, is it clearly a "game-changer" for Android gaming, but it's a premo multi-use device which I have a true weakness for and WOW: WHAT an amazing set of features! OK; so there's the Android stuff, then there's the gaming controller, but that's not even the really interesting part! If you have a certain level of nVidia graphics processor (GTX 650) and up, you can stream your games from a PC through your wireless network to this device and pretty much play full-on PC level games on it's 720p screen. Oh, and it doesn't end there! The current updates allow the machine to stream this content over the internet as well. nVidia also has a game content streaming system in Beta that will allow you to game, "netflix" style as well! All this capability was too much to resist, so when I was able to find one at $178, I bought it. I'll have to admit, that in some ways, I'm a bit like a stereotypical woman in that I will often respond to stress by shopping! More?
"As you wish" Well..... earlier in the week, I actually picked up a controller. What!?! You thought that it was already a controller? That's the gamepad looking thing next to that tablet...... the Shield Tablet that is. Yes, their is in fact more to this story. That, is my tablet upgrade target for the summer. Sadly, my ThinkPad Tablet (gen 1) is getting "long in the tooth", and even regular apps are behaving sluggishly on it. The battery life it really becoming a bit of a problem as well. So now, after 3+ years of service, it's time for it to be replaced. My original thought was to walk "into-the-light" and pick up an iPad Mini and become integrated into the Borg, but this whole Shield thing has given the "Rebel Alliance" side of me new life. The year after introducing the Shield "Portable", nVidia released the Shield Tablet. Mostly the same concept, but instead of being game-centric, this one is at least equally tablet. Allbiet a very powerful one with the K1 processor (vs. the Tegra 4). As reference, my ThinkPad Tablet has a Tegra 2. However, being an nVidia Shield device, it's optimized for games and set up to integrate the "Shield Controller" which has even better useability than the "Portable".
There's even more cool stuff to this as these devices as they can be put in a "console mode", attached through HDMI to a larger screen (real large TV) and used as a...... well...... console system! Those of you who know me (either personally or through my blogging) have probably concluded that there's a bigger picture here somewhere. Why yes..... now that you ask! You might remember that for my son's birthday, I built him a small gaming computer. Well.... I'm about to replaced the graphics card in it for an nVidia GTX 650! The Shield Portable will ultimately become his as well; probably for Christmas this year. I will ultimately move myself on to the Shield Tablet and we'll be all set to move on to the next level of digital nirvana.
