Upgrading

My previous PC had an AMD processor and a laughable 124 MB memory - I think. Probably in its heyday it was worth something, but then I was using this century. It was a hand me down from my brother and felt like a leftover from the Cretaceous Period. It hanged a lot, and you can make espressos for everybody while waiting for it to complete opening a web page. It was so slow.

So when my mom told me to upgrade stuff, which included my PC, I jumped at the opportunity.

I would have loved to have an I-Mac PC or a Mac Pro notebook ... but then my mom would've yelled at me. She gave me a budget and expected me to use my cost-cutting skills to the max. I was tasked to buy myself a new computer and upgrade 2 of our office PC's & acquire a new one.

Sick and tired of the Jurassic PC, I "splurged" myself on a laptop. It's just a Neo notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo (thank God), 80 GB hard disk drive, and 1 GB memory (thank God again). It has some other extra stuff .. . but then it doesn't matter. The important things are it's fast, efficient, and will do in this century. It came with a free Canon iP 1200 when I got it at PC Corner (there was a promo going on at the Gilmore branch last August - they have a new one going on).

The task of upgrading the PC's in the office was a bigger headache. I was planning to hand down the hand-me-down PC since it will just be used for data entry. I planned on just amping the memory up to save moola, when one day it finally rolled over and died on me. The memory conked, it cannot be replaced. I had to change the motherboard and processor as well.

While doing "research," I had fun with the PC "builder" that certain sites had so one can have an idea how much the whole PC package will cost. The sites I visited most often were www.pccorner.com.ph and www.buyqube.com. Funnily, I failed to acquire the first upgrade from both. That is because when we (me, Lofrick, & Chloe) went to Gilmore St. QC, there were a lot of computer shops offering lower prices and we picked the one nearest to where we were parked. Gilmore St. (and the area around it) is the new computer hub of Metro Manila (for those who are still thinking it is Greenhills Shoppping Center or Virra Mall). If you want brand new parts and packages in cheapo prices, go here. It's in front of St. Paul's College QC, in close proximity of the MRT station.

Of note is www.buyqube.com because they have this X-PC. Visit their site (the real one at Gilmore) you'll see these really cool small CPUs. It's not cheap, but it's worth checking out. Also, they have snappy-looking, compact Gigabyte notebooks.

Anyway, before all that I inspected the old computers in the office and discovered these stuff were a lot worse than my PC. I don't know how geriatric the processors were but when I saw the OS Windows '95 and then Microsoft Office '95 I wanted to laugh out of pity. It doesn't help that the printer was an Epson Lx-800 dot matrix. I kept wondering where they get printer ribbon refills since I know it's obsolete. The monitors were small and the screens were wavy and shaky. Diagnoses: Not upgradable, off to the junk shop.

Thanks to my trip to Gilmore, we were able to salvage some parts (hard drives and optical drives, 17" monitor) from my Jurassic PC and upgrade the processor to an Intel Celeron D 347 (not bad), an ECS motherboard (a good one), 512 MB memory (a far long hard cry from the old one), and a new ATX case. I got a multi-function HP Deskjet to retire the hardworking Epson.

I still have to buy two more PCs (and do some penny pinching) but then I thank God that computers in this country is actually a lot cheaper than anywhere else.

Incidentally, there are computer-related buy and sell stuff at wwww.sulit.com.ph worth checking out. So if you are in the same boat as I am ... I hope this blog entry helped.

PS: You can check out T3 & Speed Magazine for more info on tech stuff but then it'll just make you drool if you're a tech geek.