In spring a young geek’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. And then when these thoughts are cruelly dashed against the sharp, jagged rocks of reality, our heartbroken geek goes shopping for computer parts.
Well, anyone reading my blog recently knows about the first thing. Now comes the second. Call it what you will — retail therapy, spendthrift waste, or the pig-headed and unreasonable projection of unrequited love unto inert bits of electronics that are unable of rejection per se — but I’ve been exercising the wallet. Hey, it’s not like I need the money for other things, apparently.
First, I purchased a 22″ LCD monitor yesterday; Future Shop was having a sale on those, and I was able to snag a Samsung 225BW for $350, $50 less than the price of the unit the day before. This has been a wonderful asset in playing my favorite game, Unreal Tournament 2004 (you knows it!).
I didn’t really plan on buying anything else computing-wise, but I did go to a different FS today to see if they had a Wii console in stock. Of course they didn’t (grrr!) but I did stick around and look at the prices of different things. I saw an interesting laptop, but frankly I’m a bit overstocked on laptops already. I was about to head out and then I saw some open-box PCs on the checkout counter, and looked at the specs. And then it caught my eye.
Now, I’m not normally one to buy a pre-made PC. Or an Intel-based PC, actually. But one look at the specs of this HP desktop, and then at the price, and I was sold.
Check this out — this box had been an in-store demo unit (big deal). It has a Core 2 Duo 6300 CPU. It has 2 gigabytes of RAM. It has a 250G hard disk. It has a Lightscribe DVD-DL burner. But more important to me was the video setup — a GEForce 7500LE card with 256MB of RAM. I’m sure that the connoisseurs in the crowd will reply that the 7500 is a “lamer edition” OEM card and that its performance is piddling, which may be true, but it’s an actual PCI-E card so I can upgrade it eventually. That’s right, none of these “onboard, shared-memory video chipset” gimmicks here, this is an actual video card, with dual outputs (DVI and VGA) to boot!
On top of everything I was getting a free 250G external hard disk with the PC.
Even more surprising to me was the price. $699. I had to ask a rep whether there was something wrong with it, but no, it was just a store demo. So, I got a PC with pretty kick-ass specs, for $700.
Maybe it was a sign that I was somehow destined to be there, and not somewhere else. Who knows. Still, given what I know about the value of computer equipment, I would have had to be pretty brain-dead not to buy it.
And then later I returned to the same area and had a nice, spicy Korean octopus meal for $17, tip included. That included some tasty kimchee and seaweed salad, as well as some cold potatoes and bean sprouts which weren’t as tasty. In the end I’d say that I enjoyed the day a lot more than I thought I would.