Half-a-Blizzard

I’ve got my new computer running stable now. If you remember, I started planning for this a month ago and received most of the parts before Thanksgiving. I finished building the system when I returned home from California and Las Vegas. When I installed the hard drive, originally I tried setting it up by copying over all the information from my old 20 GB drive and reinstalling Windows. That didn’t exactly work.

Everything seems to be working up to speed. I did make some changes from the original specifications, however, so here is the list of what this baby includes:

  • Case (obviously) with a 450W power supply, an ultraviolet cathode tube, and some other fancy extras
  • Motherboard: SOYO Dragon KT-600 Platinum Ultra
  • CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2200+ with the plan to upgrade in a few months
  • Memory: 1 GB DDR SDRAM PC-3200 (2x 512 MB chips)
  • Hard Drive: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 UltraATA/133 200 GB 7200 RPM
  • Optical Drives: Sony DVD+RW/-RW 4x and SONY DVD-ROM
  • Monitor: 17 inch SXGA flat-panel LCD with 400:1 contrast ratio (the 19 inch monitors were all too expensive for me)
  • Graphics: ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with 256 MB video RAM
  • Approximate total cost: $1,500 (maybe less, I’ll check later)

I’m pretty happy with the system. I’ve already connected my dual tape deck component to the motherboard’s built-in 6-channel sound card, imported my 1993 Central Jersey Regional Symphonic Band recording onto my spacious hard drive, fixed the sound quality, and written it down to compact disc.

I’ve also played a little with video editing (using Sony’s Vegas software). I felt that the transitions between scenes in Paris Hilton’s video could use some work, so I redid them.

The included sound system doesn’t include a joystick port for MIDI, though the connection is available on the motherboard. So, I’ll still need either a USB MIDI box or a joystick port that connects to the board in order to hook up my keyboard and drum machine. I’m also eyeing a gyroscopic mouse. Maybe someday I’ll have one of those…