Computer, Part I: Peripherals

So, a couple of weeks ago, my hard drive started dying. It fails to boot up sometimes, sometimes the BIOS will rearrange the boot order, so on and so forth. There's an issue. It saddens me, because my hard drive is only about a year old and rather nice. About the same time this started, I was also in the middle of building Ben a new computer. His was old and crappy, and when it started acting funny, I put together a setup that fit within his budget and made it. It is beautiful and works perfectly, and I think he's happy.

But anyway. My hard drive is dying. Although the hard drive itself is only a year old, the oldest components in the thing date back about five years. So of course it came to my mind that I should rebuild it completely. I've begun my list on Newegg (computer parts supplier), filling it out with things like the new i7 quad-core Intel processor and an enterprise class (read: reliable and expensive) hard drive. The whole thing will be a couple of hundred dollars more than Ben's build, but I'm more of a stickler for that stuff.

But I haven't finalized the parts. The RAM I want is out of stock, and I'm not entirely sold on the hard drive I've chosen. So I'm waiting for a little while. And in the meantime, I took a look at the broken speakers that have been sitting on my desk for a year, the keyboard that occasionally repeats all the home-row keys when I press them, and the mouse that I have to slam on the desk every so often to kick start. Not to mention my one puny monitor, compared with Ben's dual-monitor setup.

And so I went shopping for the things I could buy! And I came out with a gorgeous new ASUS monitor, RAZER mouse and RAZER keyboard, and Creative speakers. I went light on the speakers (only getting a 2.0 setup, without a subwoofer) because I rarely use them, but I was set on the RAZER stuff because they make the best peripherals for gaming. I love the keyboard, although I'm still getting used to the mouse.

And here's the setup (my camera sucks, so the colors are all off, but oh well). The speakers are hidden behind the monitor, mainly because there's very little room left on the top shelf of my desk now, due to the two 19 " monitors.


The stuff came in a big box from Newegg, and Newegg (thankfully) packs with paper instead of peanuts, so this is what the mess looked like:


And this is a kitteh who crawled into the box and could hardly get out: