For those of you that don’t know, there’s a show out called “Pimp My Ride!”. On the show, people give their cars to a group of pros (Xzibit and his crew) and they pimp out the ride, adding overkill entertainment systems and generally making the rides look sweet.
My mum’s friend Charmaine was having computer troubles a while back, I thought I would be nice and go over there and check it out and, hopefully, fix the issue. The Computer, and I use that term very loosely, was running Windows 98. 98 was released in, you guessed it, 1998, making it nine years old.
That’s about 90 years in real life. It’s old. It’s fragile. It whines at everything. It’s ugly.
To top it off, the computer is running on 200mhz with 32mb of RAM. It has a freakin’ turbo button for God’s sake! I suppose I should mention now that she’s on dial-up too.
Now if you look at [url=/img/pimpmycase/old-case-back.jpg]the back of the case[/url] you will notice many things:
- The case is U shaped, meaning the top and both sides come off in one piece.
- It’s old and dusty.
- There’s no PS/2 ports.
- There’s no USB ports.
- It has an RS232 port.
- It has a parallel port.
- It has a serial port.
- It makes your eyes water.
Originally I brought around my m-robe, thinking I’ll be able to put some programs on the computer and fix her problems, but without a USB port there was no chance of that happening.
During the first time I was there Charmaine talked about eventually upgrading the computer. She mentioned that she might consider it more after she returned from her trip to Canada.
She returned a few weekends ago and her husband gave me some cash for a new everything. Here’s what I got her: Motherboard: Asus AM2-940 M2N8-VMX $65 RAM: 1GB DDR2 667 5300 $45 Monitor: Viewsonic 17” VA703B 8ms $215 Power Supply: 550 Max. SHAW PSU $25 Case: CM Ammo RC-533 $89 Keyboard: Multimedia Slim Keyboard $7 Mouse: Generic Optical Mouse $7 DVD Drive: Samsung 18x Black DVD-RW $38 CPU: AM2-940 x2 Dual Core 3600+ $88 Harddrive: 80GB Maxtor $50
Total: $629.00 Budget: $650.00
I only got the CPU because they were out of the 3200s and I didn’t want to wait another week for them to order in the parts and go to the trouble of having to go down there again.
This is a whole system and that’s an awesome price. Now for a very-near bleeding edge kit you’d pay something like $2.5k.
Anyway, there’s some pics of the new case and associated other things at [url=/img/pimpmycase]Pimp My Case[/url]. Enjoy.