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It's time for a new PC from Tiger Direct

My old computer was on it's last leg.  It was a 1 GHz Athlon with 256 MB RAM, and a 40 GB Hard Drive. It was fine playing games and running apps, even multiple apps, but there was only 2 - 3 GB of free space left on the HD -- which made it lock up on me for 2 - 3 minutes at a time.

I'd be workin' away and at any given moment, it would decide to take a break -- and there was nothing you could do but wait.

It also made this horribly loud whizzing and buzzing noise from the CPU fan occasionally, and when it did I'd kick it or tip it or just bang it around until it made a "less loud" noise, or one that was bearable at least.  Sometimes, on rare occasions, it would run nice and quiet.

Recently I had to replace the power supply, as the old one died -- twice.  The first replacement (a 250 watt PSU) only lasted a day.  An indication that the board is hogging power.  Luckily, the next new one, a 350 watt PSU, did the trick.

It was no joke -- something had to be done.

I was thinking, either upgrade some components so it works smoothly, or get myself a laptop for portable usage.  I didn't really want to spend too much money on the PC, so perhaps a bit more memory or, whatever.

I asked for my buddy Jarod's opinion.  His take:  Get a new PC.  All the way.  He says I can start with a nice bare bones kit from Tiger Direct (http://www.tigerdirect.ca) and the build it up slowly.  These guys have awesome prices by the way, and SMOKES the likes of Futureshop and BestBuy.

The idea was appealing.  The more I thought about it, the better it sounded, and the more excited I got.

Well I thought about it a lot, so much in fact that I ended up building the whole system from scratch (nevermind the bare bones kit).  This allowes me more customization options and not having to "settle" for less-than-perfect components.