Being Grateful For What I Have

I hope those of you who read this blog on a regular basis don't get the wrong impression! Despite my various posts, my life is not one long series of new, ever cooler gadgets! A lot of it is just me trying to keep up with the fast pace of modern technological change and to do so without having to expend what I consider to be ridiculous money. In reality, I often sit in wonder at what my modest income has been able to afford me. 

My daily driver "workstation" is an "Ivy Bridge" generation i7 with a Crucial half-terabyte SSD and 32Gb of RAM along with 3 more terabytes of mass storage. All this goodness resides in the Cooler Master Cosmos II Ulber-Case and attached to 4 pretty nice Lenovo ThinkVision monitors which affords me enough desktop real estate to do pretty much whatever I want without having programs double up in space. I use it every day and have never been frustrated in not being able to do ANYTHING! It's pretty much perfectly suited for my needs. 

However, for me, my real prize is the ThinkPad X1. No it's not the later carbon fiber model. It's the original one built around the "Sandy Bridge" i5. Spec-wise, it's not all that impressive. The screen's 1366 x 768, 13" The CPU is of course 3 generations old now, and being "non-carbon" means that it's significantly heavier as well. However, there's hardly anything I don't love about it. It's thin and light in the real sense of those words. The screen is a nice size and low enough resolution for my aging eyes to be able to see well. The SSD, and 8Gb of RAM make it fully capable of everything that I use it to do. As soon I pry her old T500 out of my wife's fingers, it will get a 600Gb Intel 320 SSD in the 2.5" drive bay. Last night I cloned it's Crucial M4, 256Gb mSATA SSD onto a Crucial, 480Gb M500. While that was going on, it occurred to me that never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd be able to own a cutting edge design notebook computer with over a Terabyte of solid state storage in it!

Reanimating the Alien.....ware: Part 1

Let me do a quick update, in case it's been too long since I wrote about this student-project. This is what my student's Alienware Aurora 7500 looked like when it came to us from California.... complete with FUBAR'd video card. It was just short of $200 with shipping. After a quick, oven bake; the GPU came back to life and functioned for several months while my student worked and saved for the build. About a month or so ago, the Windows 7 load crashed and "that was that". There wasn't any real point in saving it, or reloadinng, so we started looking at the parts vs. budget trade-offs.

In the meantime, we got serious about what it would look like. She had originally wanted one of the "Post-Dell" buyout computers with the sliding front panel done in flat black. However; after realizing that, that generation's machines only took Micro-ATX sized boards, we decided against going that route. In the meantime, we came across this amazing "mod" by the MNPC folks where they took specific panels and used a spray paint technique that gave it a carbon-fiber look.

 

You can see from the close-ups that the effect is remarkable! Overall, we decided that this gave us a great combination of flexibility of a full-sized case, yet a unique look that wouldn't cost too much to replicate.

 

The build will be based on the latest version of Gigabyte's G1 Sniper line that has the Z97 chipset. This not only gives it the ability to take the "Devil's Canyon" update of Intel's "Haswell" processor, but a unique high-end audio section that's isolated on the motherboard from digital interference. This was an important feature for her since she's very music oriented.

 

 

 

The timing of it couldn't have been more perfect occurring around the last week of November, thus coinciding with Newegg's avalanche of "Black Friday" sales! All-in-all, I'd estimate that we probably saved over a $100 on all these various parts. I've already talked about the motherboard, so here's the rest of it. The whole she-bang will be run by an Intel i5 4690K processor, with 16Gb (2 x 8Gb) of Corsair Vengeance Pro RAM. The OS will be loaded on a Crucial 240Gb MX-100 SSD, and the graphics handled by an EVGA/nVidia GeForce GTX 660 video card. At the end of the day, this whole set-up will come in below $1000..... and that's including the original Alienware computer! Stay tuned as I continue this series with build-logs as we make progress from here!