Personal

Why spending money on hardware sucks

Some days ago I needed a case for my girlfriends PC. I decided to leave her my old one and to order a new one for myself. My PC is running in the living room and three harddiscs, an overclocked CPU (1.6 to 2.4 GHz P4) with adequate fan, and a graphic card with fan made quite some noise. I hoped that a SilentMaxx case would reduce the noise audible. The case arrived, I put my hardware from one box into the other, but soon my graphic card decided to solve the noise problem in its own way. While I was away from keyboard, the fan silently stopped and allowed my GPU to make eggs roast. When I came back, I saw the same screen that I saw when I left, but I wondered why the Windows clock did not show the correct time. Nothing moved – the machine was totally frozen. Although I was able to see something before I restarted, the graphics adaptor never recovered – instead, the BIOS welcomes me with an unhappy “1x long, 3x short” beep. So I had to order a new graphic card too and had to decide whether to get some state of the art stuff or go for some mid-price hardware. I decided the latter, because I’m quite sure something else will break … soon …