Eating My Own Dog Food

I've written about "needs based computing" before as part of the decision process in buy vs clean in the Cleaning an Infected PC post.  This last week I had an opportunity to eat my own dog food when the integrated video failed on our home desktop.

This desktop is over six years old.  The power supply failed first a few years ago, which I replaced.  Then the integrated NIC failed a year later, which I disabled and added a 3Com PCI card to restore.  Lately the power supply has been running warm and I'd started to think that the over 52K hours that this machine has been in service had taken its toll.  When the video failed I was sure of it.

So what were the family computing needs?  Had they changed?  Increased?  Not really.  Basic web surfing, document creation, money and photo management, podcasts and music.  Pretty pedestrian stuff that the old 3.0Ghz system handled well.  Given the chance, I'd like to swap the desktop for a laptop, but this isn't the time to spend the significant money it would require to get comparable laptop performance.

Therefore, I decided to find a used system compatible with the known good components from my current system.  While there was some risk of transferring age related problems to the next machine, the immediate value equation seemed balanced.

So began checking Craigslist and the local computer shops for systems with comparable performance and compatable hardware to my current system.  The memory would be the biggest concern and the detailed specs at MemoryStock really helped speed the identification process.  The third leg the stool was insuring that the new target system was hardware compatible with my OS of choice - Linux Mint.  The Linux HCL is the definitive single source, plus Googling never hurts.

In the end, I purchased a Dell mid tower system from a local computer shop (Best Tek Support) and added in the working parts from the old machine.  Besides offering a 30 day warranty, they were incredibly flexible in configuring and pricing the system with only what I needed in it.

There's probably a "never say never" lesson for me in here too.  I stated when I bought the last desktop new, that I'd never build another custom system, piece by piece.  This came close, but I had a little fun with it too.  It has every kitchen sink media component I own installed (3.5", 250M Zip, 6-in-1 media reader, CD-RW/DVD-RW, IDE, SATA and more USB ports than I can count).

All in all a good value.  So far, we're enjoying it.  It meets our needs.