I apologize for the ultra l337 post title. I’m a giant nerd.

Here’s the deal with my wife’s old computer: it’s actually a Shuttle I built three years ago when I lived in Iowa. I wanted it to play Vampire Bloodlines: Masquerade and it was basically underpowered as soon as I built it. The smallish power supply and MicroATX motherboard that the case mandated were not good choices.

Unfortunately it recently picked up a habit in which it refused to shut down and claimed that every running program needed to be forcefully terminated. I’m no computer engineer (or am I? yes. yes I am.) but I’m pretty sure this is bad and we decided to upgrade.

We ventured out to Micro Center to get parts to build a new machine because I like being subjected to the odor of humanity in tiny, dirty spaces and I’m really wild about semi-competent sales help. Thankfully we found a guy who actually knew what he was talking about and ended up with…. this!

awesome blue fan

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TECH SPECS!

• AMD Phenom II X3 720 (2.8GHz)
• ASUS mobo
• 1GB NVidia GeForce GT 220 (nothing radical, but enough to let me play Diablo III)
• 4GB DDR2 RAMZ
• 500GB hard drive (unfortunately no solid state drives and not into the Terrabytes)
• 2 state of the art blue LED lit case fans

Oddity #1: there are actually a total of four  DIMMs for RAM expansion, but as I recently learned, 32-bit Windows7 will only recognize 3.5 GB, and of that 3.5 GB only 3.25 will be available for application use. If we ever upgrade to Windows7 64 we’ll do another upgrade here. The sales guy was confident that I could run two 2GB chips and 21GB chips with no problem as long as I seated them in the correct DIMM.

Oddity #2: the motherboard had HDMI and DVI outputs and – I learned this after purchasing – it has an integrated ATI graphics chipset. Thankfully the integrated chipset is less powerful than the NVIDIA I bought, so I feel ok about this.

Welcome to the family, new computer. I hope the cats don’t knock you over.

Here’s a picture of Howard, Nala, and I celebrating the completion of the Dremel From Hell. I’m the one in the middle. You know, the human.

An image of tubby Howard courtesy of my wife’s wicked photography skillz. This image made both of us laugh for several minutes and kind of sums up our sense of humour: cats and large letters.