Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Upgrading Cometh

Here's my up-to-date computer plan, with much help from and many thanks to Tim. He receives today's Boba Award, which while it does not come with a cash reward like the Nobel Prize, it is nearly as prestigious.

Anywho, here it is. Everything should fit together just fine (in theory). I assume the power supply that Tim has will fit with everything okay? I also added a new video card that should be better than what I had before.

Store of Tim Case / Power Supply [ $7.00 ]
Widescreen 20" [ 246.98 ]
Vista Premium [ 75.99 ]
Wireless KB/M [ 25.99 ]
2GB Flash Drive [ 19.55 ]
Headphones [ 19.99 ]
500GB Drive [ 86.00 ]
4GB RAM [ 109.96 ]
DVD/CD RW [ 34.50 ]
Motherboard [ 68.00 ]
CPU [ 170.00 ]
Video [ 115.00 ]

Total: $978.96

Prices may vary, of course, when I order everything later this week. Here's another question for Tim - and it may be a silly question, but I just want to make sure - the motherboard specifies that it was 4 memory slots and "Maximum Memory Supported" of 4 GB. Is that 4 GB per slot, and not total? Right now, I have four 1GB sticks.

LotD: Lamborghini Reventón. Lamborghini's newest model, new for 2008. It's purdy.

15 comments:

Mac Man said...

The total for all four slots combined is 4 GB, so you're fine buying 4 1 GB sticks of RAM. However, it looks like the RAM you priced out is DDR2 667MHz. The motherboard takes DDR2 800Mhz, so you'll have to buy a little faster RAM (you can be faster than what it supports, but not slower).

If you really want to look at having more than 4 GB in the future, you may have to look at another board. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that you're not going to really see much of a benefit with a 32 bit operating system, which can't address more than 4 GB of memory anyways. Here's a quick link that I found that might help:

Max amount of memory with Windows

DVK said...

Nuts, Tim beat me to it agian!

Forget the comp: get the car!

TF on IMAX on Saturday!!! Don't forget!!!

Mac Man said...

I'm just sooooo fast. I'm practically just a blur.

Joel said...

Ah, good call. I have selected new 800 MHz RAM.

Though I hope the quality is good (as it would be the "basic" RAM on that page), but I may not be able to get 4 GB if I go much higher than that in price.

Joel said...

Whoooooooooooooooooooooosh!

What was that?

Oh, it was just Tim commenting on my blog.

Mac Man said...

I have another sweet deal for you. How about paying $3.66 less for some really good brand-name memory? Worth it? I think so!

My email this morning included an advertisement from Tiger Direct, which had a rebate on Patriot memory. I went to NewEgg, and found that they had the same rebate for a couple dollars cheaper still.

I bought Patriot memory when I built my computer. It was both cheap (after rebate) and had great reviews. You can get 2 GB of Patriot RAM for $57.99 after a $40 rebate (normally $97.99). If you get two sets, you'll probably want someone else to buy the second set and send in the rebate so you don't have one rejected for sending them both in with the same name. I could buy one for you if you'd like.

This is likely to be much better performing memory than the basic generic memory you were looking at, and it costs less. Okay, perhaps with paying for shipping twice due to two rebates it costs the same, but you get the point! ;-)

Mac Man said...

Also, a quick heads up.

Your monitor is listed at $237.98 right now at ascendtech, $9 cheaper than you are currently listing it as. Plus, there is free shipping this week. You might want to talk the woman into allowing an early partial order to take advantage of that and save about $20 combined on the monitor and shipping.

Just a thought.

Mac Man said...

Okay, I promise to leave you alone for at least a few minutes after this comment.

I got to thinking after seeing the free shipping deal on the monitor that it might be a good idea to check on how long the various rebates are good for. The Patriot memory rebate and the motherboard rebate are both only good for purchases through this coming Sunday. You might want to consider ordering those at least very soon (today would be best) to make sure there are no problems getting the order in under the deadline.

If you've decided that that's the way you want to go, let me know and I can order my share of the Patriot memory today (if you want to do it that way), with you ordering the motherboard and the other half of the memory.

DVK said...

I think we should enroll Tim in Blog Commenters Anonymous....

Mac Man said...

Hello. I'm Tim. And I have a problem...

Joel said...

Hi Tim.

DVK said...

Hi Tim.

A. Bauer said...

01000011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101001 01100101 01110110 01100101 00100000 01010100 01101001 01101101 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01100011 01101000 01100101 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110101 01110011 00100000 01110101 01110011 01100101 00100000 01101000 01100101 01111000 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110011 01110100 01100101 01100001 01100100 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00111111 00100000 01010111 01101000 01101111 00100000 01100100 01101111 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00111111

DVK said...

It's too early in the morning to translate binary....

Joel said...

01001001 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100001 00100000 00100000 01001000 01100101 00100111 01110011 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01101000 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100110 01110101 01111010 01111010 01101000 01100101 01100001 01100100 00101110

59 65 74 20 63 6f 75 6c 64 20 68 65 20 68 61 76 65 20 61 20 70 6f 69 6e 74 3f

01010000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01100001 01100010 01101100 01111001 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00101110

Ich mag Käse.