You know that you’re getting old when you have to ask your children’s advice on technology, rather than vice versa.
I’m long out of date on personal computer technology. OK, the basic building blocks remain the same, but who knows which are the best value and most reliable disks, processors, and memory? The younger generation, that’s who!
So grateful thanks to my son, who made up the parts list, then assembled the computer itself for our latest desktop PC. The previous one, which had a wonderful array of SCSI disks, finally expired beyond economic repair.
So here goes. It’s not a high-end games or video machine – we don’t do that. But it’s jolly nice, and quicker than greased weasel poo.
For some reason specifications always start with the processor, but that’s not the half of it. We have an AMD FX-4 4100 Black Edition 4 Core 3.6Ghz with 8MB cache. That’s fairly tasty.
But wait! There’s a 120GB Solid State Disk with a read speed of 285MB/s, and a write of 275MB/s. That’s probably the greatest contribution to speed, since it’s where the programs reside.
Add to that 8GB DDR3 1866Mhz memory, two 1TB hard drives working at 7200RPM and with 64MB cache, configured as RAID 1 to avoid data loss, plus an assortment of other goodies, and you can see why I’m quite proud of it.
Still using the old IBM Model M keyboard, though. It’s one of our prized possessions!
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