Prytania, or New Comp 2.0
Saturday I went around the local stores and after much deliberation I bought a HP Pavilion a1646x. I remember when I used to do tech support for the Pavilions, back when HP first started making them. I guess I am really dating myself with the statement that I did tech support, since no American companies have tech support in the US anymore.
This one only has a 1.8 ghz Core 2 Duo, and no IDE controllers on the motherboard at all. On the other hand, it came with a 200 gig sata drive, and I had hung on to the 300 gig sata drive I had bought last week, thinking it would be the only one sata drive I would have in the Tiger Direct comp. So now I have plenty of room to hang on to my dvd rips and image files. I was also surprised to find that the dvd burner does not use a pata IDE interface (which as I said, the comp does not have any controllers for). Instead it is a sata drive. I had no idea they made sata dvd burners. Though it makes sense that they would start doing so, seeing how much faster the sata bus is than the pata. The HP also supports Dual Channel memory, which is nice, and came with a gig of DDR2. It still has two memory slots left open, so I can add more later.
One thing that really surprises me is how quiet it is. I cannot hear any fan noise at all (and the fans are all working, I checked!). The only thing from the Tiger Direct stuff that I hung on to (and actually worked), was the Nvidia 7600 GT video card. So I still have good video. Very good video.
I spent all of Saturday and part of Sunday just installing things or copying them from my old comp. The latter was accomplished by starting up the old one, and then pulling out the monitor, keyboard, and mouse plugs and putting them in the new one, but leaving the network cable still in so it was still on the network. Windows would not allow me to the Windows or Docs and Settings folders from another computer, so I had to switch cables back and forth to copy over things like my mouse cursors and more importantly, things like my Firefox and Thunderbird extensions and past emails.
Sunday night I had the chance to install Neverwinter Nights 2 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and see how they run. I could not even create a character in Oblivion on my old comp, and while I was able to do so in NWN 2, actually playing the game was impossible. Both ran fine, with all the graphics turned up to their hightest levels. YaaY!
All in all I am very, very happy with my new HP. I have named it Prytania, and the two drives Medea and Kirke.
This one only has a 1.8 ghz Core 2 Duo, and no IDE controllers on the motherboard at all. On the other hand, it came with a 200 gig sata drive, and I had hung on to the 300 gig sata drive I had bought last week, thinking it would be the only one sata drive I would have in the Tiger Direct comp. So now I have plenty of room to hang on to my dvd rips and image files. I was also surprised to find that the dvd burner does not use a pata IDE interface (which as I said, the comp does not have any controllers for). Instead it is a sata drive. I had no idea they made sata dvd burners. Though it makes sense that they would start doing so, seeing how much faster the sata bus is than the pata. The HP also supports Dual Channel memory, which is nice, and came with a gig of DDR2. It still has two memory slots left open, so I can add more later.
One thing that really surprises me is how quiet it is. I cannot hear any fan noise at all (and the fans are all working, I checked!). The only thing from the Tiger Direct stuff that I hung on to (and actually worked), was the Nvidia 7600 GT video card. So I still have good video. Very good video.
I spent all of Saturday and part of Sunday just installing things or copying them from my old comp. The latter was accomplished by starting up the old one, and then pulling out the monitor, keyboard, and mouse plugs and putting them in the new one, but leaving the network cable still in so it was still on the network. Windows would not allow me to the Windows or Docs and Settings folders from another computer, so I had to switch cables back and forth to copy over things like my mouse cursors and more importantly, things like my Firefox and Thunderbird extensions and past emails.
Sunday night I had the chance to install Neverwinter Nights 2 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and see how they run. I could not even create a character in Oblivion on my old comp, and while I was able to do so in NWN 2, actually playing the game was impossible. Both ran fine, with all the graphics turned up to their hightest levels. YaaY!
All in all I am very, very happy with my new HP. I have named it Prytania, and the two drives Medea and Kirke.