Short and sweet:
I’ve been having problems with my computer, a Dell Latitude CPx (laptop.) As soon as I’d stick a disk in the floppy bay, it’d spin up, keep spinning and eventually tell me that it was an imporper format (but the drive woyuld work fine if it was connect via parallel.) Even if I ejected the disk, literally, 1/2 second after it started spinning and then placed in a different computer, it was already corrupt. They switched out the system board twice and sent me some new floppy-drives, but to no avail.
Today they sent me a replacement computer.
I had a 650 Mhz, I got a 850Mhz.
I had 128Mb of RAM, I got 256Mb.
I had a CD-ROM, I got a CD-RW (!!!)
I had a basic carrying case, I got a nice, new leather one.
In short, I made out like a bandit. Now all I need is to find a copy…uh, my companies copy, of MS Office and I’m set.
Hey, I need a new computer, toooo! <whiny voice> My computer’s got Win95, and it suc…stinks. I can’t upgrade AOL5.0 to 6.0 ‘cause the computer language isn’t compatible, and I don’t even know enough to even tell you more than that. AND, it cost $5000 when it was new 7 years ago. Hey, stop laughing guys, I’m serious here. I’ll bet you don’t remember paying $500 for a VCR when they came out in the early 80’s, do ya? Or almost the same for a brand spankin’ new-fangled gizmo called a microwave in the late 70’s either? See, I buy first, not better. Uh…never mind.
Hey, I got a new computer, too. A power supply problem literally fried my old one, so SO and I went in together to build a Sweet Box!
It runs at the lightning speed of 900 Mghz.
It has enough memory to outlast and elephant- 512Mb.
I got a new video card (in addition to my old one which does video input/output stuff) that has a 64mg onboard processor.
Left over from my old computer is a CDR drive that writes at 16x and a DVD player.
I just finished assembling a system I built for a friend today.
Abit VP6
Intel P-III/1GHz times 2!
1GB RAM
Matrox G400 Twinhead
Newtek Video Toaster
Dual Princeton Graphics EO90 19" monitors
Maxtor 60GB 7200rpm EIDE times 4!
Sigma Designs MPEG-2 encoder card
Adaptec IEEE-1394 interface
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI interface
Toshiba CDRW/DVD combo drive
Panasonic DVD-RAM drive
This is one ass-kicking NLE/DVD-mastering box. I’m really looking forward to the Lightwave rendering tests.
Burn-in is going to take at least a week
He’s already past $5500, just for parts. I still haven’t decided my fee for assembling, tuning, and testing it. I may stick my GeForce GTS card in it in place of the Twinhead, just to see what kind of framerates I can get in Half-Life.