I’m a PC (at least for now)

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Published: 03/01/2011

Last weekend a tragic event befell me. I came home to what appeared to be a gently sleeping laptop. When I tried to awaken it, the computer made no response. Knowing that such behaviour is no cause for alarm, I calmly restarted the machine manually.

It turned on, but the screen was covered with a glitchy blue checkered pattern and would not fully boot up. The same thing occurred each time I restarted.

glitch

I’ve been using the same Mac Book Pro laptop since starting college nearly four and a half years ago. Since then, my computer has been subject to pretty heavy usage on a daily basis, and it has even survived being dropped a few times, but until last week it had never giving me a problem. I knew however that it was fast approaching the end of it’s expected lifetime. My warranty had expired long ago and it was probably only a matter of months before I’d have to find a replacement.

Fearing the worst, I took it over to a close friend who had worked at a computer repair shop. After running some tests, he told me it looked likely that the motherboard had bit the dust. This diagnosis seemed to match up with what folks were saying online. After researching some prices, it turned out that procuring a new motherboard would cost almost as much as a new computer.

Now, I’d been watching the the macrumors.com buyer’s guide, and knew that apple was about to release the next generation of Mac Book Pro’s any day, I just didn’t know when (as I write this, I see that the new generation was indeed released four days ago!) To tide me over, I needed something quick, cheep and powerful, and to this end, I was willing to get my hands dirty. I decided to build myself (under my friend’s guidance) a new computer from individual components - something I’d actually been wanting to do for a long time. I guess had to take a disaster to provoke me into action on this one.

The next day, we headed over to Micro Center, arriving about 45 min before they closed. In under 30 minutes, we manages to collect everything we needed, which included:

Tower case (Cooler Master)
Power supply (Inland)
DVD drive (LG)
Hard drive (Seagate 1Terabyte)
Motherboard (MSI)
RAM (generic 4 Gigabytes)
Graphics card (Radion 1Gigabyte)
Processor (AMD Athelon II Quad Core)
Display (AOC 22inch HD)
Keyboard (Inland)
Mouse (already owned)
Windows 7 DVD

chart

After about five hours of work and a six pack of beer, we had the new machine up and running. Then we went out for more beer, chicken wings, and burgers. All told, the process was much easier than I had imagined. This might have had something to do with the fact that I had an expert telling me what to do, but I think I could probably do it again on my own. After all, I was a Lego master back in my early years.

parts

A few days later, I was close to full functionality with all my fonts, music and the adobe suite. The immediate transition was pretty quick, but some things are going to take longer, namely getting up to the same level of fluency with Windows as I had with Mac OS. I don’t want to be biased out of hand, but I suspect that Mac is just a superior operating system. Their file system is much more intuitive, and there are many little details that go along way towards make everyday interaction easier, like the ability to press space and quickly get a preview of the file or folder. The other thing I’ve noticed is that typography does not seem to look as good on Windows machines across the board. This is especially noticeable when using web browsers, but it’s also apparent in the adobe programs like InDesign. However, Windows is not directly responsible for the most egregious aspect of my new machine. As result of my chosen motherboard, I have to look at this beautiful composition every time I boot up.

ugly

Despite these minor grevences, I’m happy to have a fast new computer.

Ben Koditschek — Creative Designer

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