every form of refuge has its price
hile the nearly two weeks spent at home was nice, and getting to spend so much time with my dear welfy, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I'm glad to have the wheels back on the road. All that time, though, allowed me to work on The Guy RoomTM. It has a long way to go, but Rome wasn't built in a day. We can only hope the decadence and grandeur of The Guy RoomTM can someday give Rome a run for its money.
The basement had begun to collect all manner of clutter from its general state of non-use so I began by sorting, organizing, and finding homes for this stuff. I decided to re-arrange the futon and coffee table and put them on the opposing wall. I also finalized the piecing together of a new PC I had started building, but more on that in a bit. First things first, I got some things hung on the wall, in particular, my Black-Jesus-Hanging-Out-With-Dead-Rappers art that I bought a few weeks ago found a home beside the door leading to the garage.
At the bottom of the steps, greeting all entrants to the Domain of Dudes, is a sign that Welf got for me.
Fubu likes The Guy RoomTM, too. She hangs out with me a lot when I'm down there.
So, another thing I added to the room was a fun kitty toy dipped in catnip oils. She had a blast.
Another thing which I put in my room was the lovely gift I received from yourtourniquet a couple of weeks ago, my Hustler ashtray.
Right now, though, the center-piece of The Guy RoomTM is my new computer. Some of the finest machinery consumer credit can buy!
Actually, it's a generation or two behind leading edge technology which is where I'm most comfortable. I just can't bring myself to pay inflated prices for things which will drop exponentially in a matter of months. So no dual core processor, SATA 3, or PCI-express for me just yet, but it is the closest things to a "gaming rig" I've ever built. In the interest of getting our geek on, here's what's in the box:
939 Slot Motherboard with on-board 5.1 sound, 2xSATA-150, and 4 RAM slots upgradeable to 4GB
AMD Athlon 64 +4000 (2.4 Ghz)
2 GB Dual-channel 128-bit RAM
Radeon 9600 XT 256MB AGP display adapter
160 GB Ultra-133 7200 IDE disk that I'm booting from
Two 300GB SATA-150 disks in a RAID 1 array for fault tolerant storage
I embellished the rig with some updates in peripheral hardware, too, most notably the addition of a 21" refurbished CRT monitor that I picked up for 50 bucks at Tigerdirect.
I also bought a brand new Logitech trackball since mine seems to have disappeared over the years, as well as a wireless Logitech keyboard/optical mouse combo. I also bought a cheap set of 5.1 speakers to take full advantage of the on-board sound.
Not counting the two, 300GB storage drives which I already had, I put the entire thing together, including the case and power supply for right around $500 and so far I've been very pleased with it. I played an old FPS game I had lying around and it ran like a dream. Then like a big idiot, I decided I just HAD to have a dual-boot system for some old programs that like Windows 98 better than XP and spent most of my last, full day at home trying to make this newer computer architecture work with an old OS... one which Microsoft stopped supporting 4 months ago. I'm still getting some blue screen in Win98, but I haven't finished installing all the updates I was able to find, so maybe I'll be able to get it stable once I return home.
For the future: I definitely want to get a monstrous LCD or plasma wide screen which will serve for movie/TV watching in addition to being the primary display for the computer relegating the CRT to a secondary monitor in a dual display. I eventually want to get several more hard drives. I'm leaning toward getting two or three 10,000 RPM SCSI drives for a RAID 0 boot/application volume, since they're like, dirt cheap (although by the time I actually get around to funding this, the SATA3 drives and controllers might be reasonable) and move the 160GB IDE into a new box along with the storage drives (and maybe buy a couple more of those, too, for a RAID 5) and build a dedicated storage machine that's independent from the gaming/media machine. I need a DVD-ROM drive, too. Eventually I'll have to get a real stereo system for music listening; the bargain 5.1's have an ok sound and make the gaming experience a lot richer, but they don't quite cut it for general music listening. I need to get a nice set of speaker cabinets and get my Technics component system out of storage. Especially the turntable. I miss my turntable.