supercomputer

i spent most of Thanksgiving weekend with Tracy and had a wonderful time. she’s been buying parts for her own computer and this weekend we went out and she bought a super-sweet Lian-Li PC-60 aluminum case. previously i’ve only read glowing reviews about this case and seeing it in person for the first time didn’t disappoint me. top-notch quality all-around. no sharp edges to cut yourself with, there are detachable drive cages for floppies and hard drives, and thumbscrews everywhere. i thought one of the coolest things was that the hard drive cage sits just behind the dual fans in the front of the case. why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? along with the case, she also bought an Enermax 350W Whisper power supply and a top-of-the-line Teac floppy drive from this very cool store in SD called chipsandmemory.com. now i’ve been to many computer parts stores and this place is right up there, if not at the top. it’s clean, organized, and they actually make an effort to show off their products — unlike some places where all you have is a list of parts and everything is in a backroom. prices are low too. the only drawback was the salesguy glowing over how great and stable WinXP is. (Chris Rock rant: OSes are supposed to be stable, you low-expectation @#$%^!) heh. we were all smiling, but for different reasons — Tracy and I knew better since we are *nix enlightened. funny how you have to lower your expectations when you run a ‘doze OS. other than the live XP commercials, they were professional and courteous. she had also purchased a DVD drive and SB Live! 5.1 soundcard from this other place (and from what she told me, they seriously need an attitude adjustment from how they treated her), and a hard drive and 2×256 DDR RAM sticks from PC Club, so along with the case, we decided to put together what we could. this was Tracy’s first time to put a computer together so i made sure she did her fair share of work too. =) having the Lian-Li case made it super easy. i wish i had one for myself now! so all she has left to buy before she has a working computer is a video card, CPU and motherboard. a GeForce3 would probably be overkill, since she doesn’t do quake-type games, so a GeForce2-based video card will do fine. the CPU is definitely going to be an AMD Athlon. the prices on those are constantly falling, so it’s good we saved that for last. i can’t wait to get this thing running! it’s going to be one smoking Linux box… yep, Linux. =D