I have been waiting for a good time to do an overhaul on my desktop computer. The current setup was almost 2.5 years old and started to become unreliable. I made a trip to PC Club today and picked up a new MSI K8N Neo 4 motherboard, AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPU, GeForce 6200 video card, and 1GB of Kingston RAM. Overall, it ran about $500 and I can already see a huge difference in speed…especially with Photoshop. It used to take a good 20 - 30 seconds for PS to load, but now it take about 5. Gotta love the extra speed. I initially set this desktop up in such a way that I could easily swap components and keep it up to date. It looks like that worked and thanks to a useful Microsoft support page, I didn’t have any problems getting everything back up and running (I know…”useful Microsoft” is probably an oxymoron, but it really worked…flawlessly).
I’m psyched about the new house. Can’t wait for it to be completed. Unfortunately, it isn’t supposed to be done until January or February of next year.
One of the coolest features so far is that we upgraded the appliances. I had been planning on upgrading and getting black appliances. When we went to the design center, the option was given for upgrading everything to stainless steel. I love stainless steel. The price difference was only a couple hundred dollars and in the grand scheme of things, that’s not a whole lot. The package we bought gives us a stainless steel dishwasher, range, microwave, and we added the stainless refrigerator.
The other upgrade that I really like is the structured wiring. I made sure to put at least one LAN port in every room. The LAN ports are close to the cable outlets (TV location) so I can play Xbox Live anywhere in the house without having to mess with my wireless game adapter. The company that will be doing the structured wiring is also wiring speakers to the living room, family room, back patio, garage, and master bedroom. The family room will have surround sound prewired in the ceiling, so I can keep Christie happy by not running wires all over the place.
Jeff sent this to me this morning. I’ve only been able to make it 76 meters. He claims to have stumbled 93 meters.