Time To Kill, Part I: Hardware

The Golden Girls, a.k.a. my mother and her sister, were determined to see the latest Twilight movie.  My father, being a wise man, did not try to talk the women out of the trip and my mother, in her wisdom, did not expect my father to sit through hours of angst-ridden, teenage melodrama.  This sort of tact and understanding is one of the bigger secrets to a succesful marriage of 36 years.

The ladies did, however, need a ride.  I decided to join my father in taking the trip and then I killed a few hours while The Golden Girls swooned over teenage boys.  This trip, for me, was a 13GNE rant bonanza.  If I tried to write about it all at once, we would have a ten-page document that no one besides The Editor would read.  Having read it, he would most likely “accidentally” click the Delete button (and then do it again on the Yes-I-Really-Want-To-Delete-It button).

Instead, we’ll make it a trilogy: Hardware, Software and Books.

[Editor's Note: I will totally delete Part II and not Parts I and III just so I can sit here and laugh and laugh and laugh...]

Rant the First: Hardware

Now, some may think that the geek-macho-male store to wander through would be something like  Best Buy, Radio Shack or (for Katzwinkel and Juszczak) The Apple Store, and to a certain extent all of those gadgets and media do get the geek male excited.  But the real equivalent to blue-collar-macho-hardware-store for the geek male can only be an outlet store like Tiger Direct, CompUSA or Fry’s.  These places may have a few gadgets, but what you’re really there for is to look at the parts.  There is just something about seeing an entire wall full of blister-packed hard drives and video cards that takes a man right to his happy place.

One of the first things we found (and one of the few purchases we made) was a simple cable / power supply combo that would allow us to plug any parallel or serial hard drive into a usb port. When we got home, we went down into the basement and removed six hard drives from various machines that have been gathering dust for years.  The boxes went into the garbage the hard drives went with my father.  He was able to check the drives and make sure they had been formatted and that no data was left on them and then they too went in the trash. A couple bucks spent on a simple device and we cleaned out a good amount of room in the basement.

The next thing I saw was a device for cooling RAM.  It had big copper fins and looked like it would be efficient at dissipating heat.  I just had to wonder, “What is a person doing with the computer that causes the RAM to overheat, and why have I never done anything like this?” I’ve never heard anyone say that RAM cooling is a priority in their gaming machine.  Most boxes come with two fans built in and then you get another monster attached to a heat sink on the CPU, creating a virtual wind tunnel inside your box, so is RAM heat something anybody really has to worry about?  I have no idea but I find myself wanting one of these things just in case.

This brings me to the tower cases.  I saw the box of my dreams. It had an 850 power supply and a nearly-endless supply of bays to stick drives and devices in.  The thing had to be near three feet tall.   One of the removable side panels was fifty percent fan and there was another fan attached to the top of the box.  I’ve seen a server station in a person’s house before (and was duly envious) but I’ve never seen anybody make a PC with a box like this. As much as I would like to make something like that into a gaming machine, you just do not need room for the hard drives in a gaming machine.  No, this is the small business file dump.  I cannot justify owning one, but I still dream of making it mine.

The final stop on the hardware line was the mother boards.  These things are always deceptively cheap.  I look at a top-of-the-line board on the wall and it can be mine for less than two hundred dollars.  But will it work with my current CPU and RAM?  Is it compatible with my video card or would I be making a card upgrade at the same time?  Who does the on-board sound codec and is it better than the Sound Blaster Audigy I have in my current machine.  Really, the only way to buy a new motherboard in a place like this is to have it researched ahead of time and be ready with a list of what else you need.  As neat as they are to look at, I never get too excited about mother boards as the aftermath of getting a new one can be months of tweaking your machine, especially for someone as partially-informed as me.

Next time, Rant the Second: Software.

Image courtesy of XKCD.com