Also, my old computer case was a little loud. So annoying. Really, it all just adds up to needing a new computer, don’t you think?

The Set Up, in no particular order. Most items purchased from Newegg which has good prices and lots of reviews. Also, they ship when they say they will. Some things were purchased from Amazon but they shipped late and kept changing the predicted ship date, which is unusual since Amazon is generally really good at this!
• Case: Silverstone Temjin TJ08-E A case for a mATX board, so it’s smaller. Also, it’s supposed to be pretty quiet — I check Silent PC Review for their reviews. Quiet is much more important than you’d think when it comes to computers. Anyway, the case is nice and quiet for sure, but I found putting together the computer pretty annoying because it was so cramped. It did have a slide out motherboard tray which was really helpful. I’m not much of one for opening my computer to mess around though, so it’s basically okay. Yut much prefers his P183 which is humongous. He doesn’t mind the size. We like our computers on our desks but I don’t like the big black box next to me.
• Hard drive: Kingston V+100 96 GB SSD Mostly I wanted an affordable SSD. Dude, if anyone reading this is looking to buy a computer, buy an SSD. It might even be worth it to either pay for the upgrade or buy one to install yourself, if you are at all inclined for that sort of thing. It speeds up boot-up amazingly.
• Processor: Intel i5 2500KSpeedy Sandy Bridge processor — a step or two below the top of the line. Top of the line is too expensive. Usually at around $200-250 is the price/performance sweet spot.
• Motherboard: Asus P8Z68-M A mATX motherboard. The standard one got good reviews and my last motherboard was Asus. Also read good things about UEFI on Newegg.
• RAM: Patriot Gamer 2 Series 8 GB Was on sale and didn’t have the super tall heat spreaders because…
• Heatsink: Xigmatek Gaia SD1283 Sooo tall. Almost too tall for the case. It seemed like it should be quiet-ish based on Silent PC Review’s reviews on other similar heatsinks, and it was cheap.

Total: under $700

The old computer. I took the power supply, an old Corsair 520HX which is modular. We still like it and it had the plugs I needed. Also I am reusing one of my old hard drives — the other one was an IDE and the new motherboard doesn’t support that any more. And the optical drive? I don’t remember. It looks like it might be IDE also in the picture.

Isn’t she cute? One of the hardest parts was keeping all of the rabbits and rabbit hair away from the computer.

Here’s the motherboard on the motherboard tray and the processor and heat sink installed. We forgot to install the heat sink before installing the motherboard on the motherboard tray which was a mistake since there’s a part to install on the underside of the motherboard so we had to undo and redo.

Look who else is helping!

Tada! New computer pretty much done, except for the side panel.

After all these months, it’s been fairly quiet. Periodically (as in not every day) there is a high pitched whine sound which is super annoying now. May be something I can figure out and fix but I haven’t yet. I didn’t buy a graphics card because onboard graphics are getting better and I’m not exactly playing crazy high graphics games. It plays Civ fine and if I ever feel like it, I can add one later.

I meant to make this post in September but it took a long time to transfer the photos from the camera to the computer. :)

But also, as y’all know, we moved this year, right around the time of the tournament (I know, what were we thinking?!) and it was so busy. I am sure there are people out there who are organized and label their boxes and then unpack them and clean and blah blah, and even they don’t like moving. Well… I am NOT organized and there was no labeling, and at the end, we were throwing stuff in paper bags and moving those over and then the cleaning! There are floors that need mopping, and trees dropping branches and leaves, and laundry, and etcetc. It’s calmed down a lot since the beginning, but still. (Hrmmm, actually quite a number of you have had to deal with my litany of complaints every time you say “hey” so let this be a preview and warning to you. Although CT gets it the worst, I have been sending her whining unsolicited emails inviting her to visit me so I can show her the new place but we both know I just want someone to unpack stuff and put it away and organize and clean and get me a drink!)

But ANYWAY, enough of that, FOR NOW (more coming, that’s a threat, not a promise)! For doing so well (note how I am being gracious, although less so now that I am pointing out my graciousness), I thought K deserved an acknowledgment, late or not.

This year’s Know-Nothing Official Final Standings although we all knew how it was going to pan out a long time ago:
Special K (nice job, only one to break 60 points): 63
mim, Pol (beginner’s luck!): 59
Yut: 56
President of the US: 55
Lew, Chalk: 54
CT, misa, Seth (way outta the cellar): 48
shio: 46
YuHK (alone at the bottom!): 45

I have put CT in charge of your prize! Collect it when you see her. Congrats, aren’t you glad Air Force wasn’t in it this year:)

So we started to talk about upgrading our AT&T DSL service. They have tiers, $5 gets you slightly better service, you know how that goes. Well we had 3 mbps download and 512 kbps up, which is already the second best possible tier. So we could pay $35 for 6mbps down and 768kbps, which was somewhat tempting because there’d be no changes, the service would just get better. But Comcast (which we used to have years and years ago but canceled due to horrible-ness) has a promotion for $25 per month for something like 15? mbps down and 5? mbps up! I know, it’s at least five times better, for less! Geez, what was AT&T thinking. Although to be fair, AT&T does offer FiOS service with amazing speeds, but they only bundle it with TV service or whatever. (Again, what were they thinking?!)

So yeah, we switched. The customer service guy on the phone (because for some reason, trying to sign up online felt harder — I’m a troglodyte) was nice and efficient. And dude, the Comcast tech actually showed up on time for the appointment!!! So we are hopeful that they are going to be better than they were, service wise. So far, we love it, everything feels much nicer and there is no more internet hogging, or grumpy accusations thereof. :)

Hopefully this solves the problem, or else we might have to adopt Michael’s method: cable service for one, dsl for the other. And to think I used to make fun of him for it.

We canceled the DSL a few days after the cable service got working — can’t have downtime, y’know — and canceled our home phone service too. Too bad AT&T has crap cell service at home. Luckily Yut isn’t on AT&T as well.

My list, in no particular order:

• Mozilla Firefox with Mouse Gestures add-on
  I’m used to it, Chrome installs per user instead of per computer which irritates me and has no mouse gestures, Safari also has no mouse gestures that I know of — please correct me if I’m wrong, cos it is the prettiest, and I dunno, I never got used to Opera.
• Thunderbird with Lightning add-on
  Email + Calendar with google calendar sync and no Outlook
• Symantec Endpoint Protection
  For antivirus because it’s licensed by work. But I’ve heard good things about Microsoft Security Essentials, so I would try that if I needed one for free because I wouldn’t pay for antivirus at this point.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
  Not cos I like this program, cos I don’t. But I need to view pdfs sometimes, and the other viewers I’ve tried, like Foxit, didn’t always display everything correctly.
• PDFCreator
  To make pdfs
• Digsby
  For email notification and IM
• Picasa
  3.5 has name tags! Very spiffy! And it’s easy to use.
• Flickr Uploadr
  I need to upload photos.
• SSH Secure Shell
  I need to find a replacement for this, so suggestions welcome.
• iTunes
  For my iPod Shuffle.
• Adobe Flash Player
  I don’t like this! But Flash is all over every restaurant’s site and I need it for YouTube, to name just two things!
• The Sims 3
  I have a mild addiction. I blame Al and Julie cos they got the game for me (thanks guys!), but if I’m being truthful, I have been addicted to previous versions of the Sims, so I’m not sure I should really be blaming anyone. I try to only play on weekends, but sometimes I slip.
• Microsoft Office
  For when my sister sends me spreadsheets of what beauty products she’s buying and says I can add on what I want. :D

That’s all I can think of for now. Any recommendations? What do y’all use? :)

Speaking of email though, a couple of nights ago, I had about 5-10 minutes when I just couldn’t log in to my Y! mail account. It was really random, kept telling me my username or password was wrong when I knew both were fine. Yut was able to log in on the same computer, so I knew it wasn’t something to do with my computer (caps lock or whatever), and then however many minutes later, it was all fine again. Scary! I really wish Yahoo would allow me to use an email application (like Thunderbird) to check my mail and save a copy on my computer (via IMAP or at least POP). I know it was only 5-10 minutes, but what if it hadn’t fixed itself? This is one area where Gmail is superior (not that Yahoo! is superior everywhere else, more that both are whatevers to me), only I am pretty sure most people don’t keep a backup of their Gmail either. :D

So… I think it’s pretty much cleaned up now, but I have to re-do all of my prettifying and figure out what plugins I want to use now. I’m too tired! And I know that most people thing that dark text on light background is best, but this default theme is way too glarey! Or I’m getting old. Or something. Gaaaaah, there needs to be 1 button upgrades, even easier than it is now! And I’m ranting but it’s my blog and it really was annoying, SO THERE! :p

Okay and since I’m doing this upgrade and all, I think I’m going to stop using Disqus. It’s not that I don’t like it, I do actually, but it’s like 1 more thing to think about and deal with and right now, I don’t wanna! So I’m not totally sure, but I don’t think I can import the comments back in, and they weren’t mirrored, so they are sort of lost. I mean I can still see them on disqus, but not you. Like you care!

So here it is, all the parts for the new computress, all set and ready to go:

I meant to take a bunch of photos, but part way through when things got more complicated I forgot.
Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, 4 MB L2 Cache
4 GB (2x2GB) Mushkin RAM (32 bit Windows systems can only recognize a little over 3 GB but it was a good price)
750 GB Western Digital hard drive — I’ve heard really good things about the Samsung Spinpoint series also, but pricewise, this was better
XFX GeForce 8600GT 256 MB GDDR3 OC video card
Corsair HX 520 power supply (same as mine, we love modular power supplies)
Antec P182 case (gigantic!)
MSI P35 Neo2-FR motherboard
Zerotherm BTF-90 heatsink/fan (pretty)
etcetc, total: almost $900 after rebates. It was as little trouble to put together as any computer we’ve ever tried. :)