The son’s PC finally died 2 days ago. After chugging along for nearly 6 years now, I guess it was time for an upgrade. We bought his original PC back in Nov 2000 and paid about RM1200 for an AMD Duron 600 MHz CPU, 64MB SDRam and Riva TNT-2 AGP 16MB VGA card setup. (we used an old monitor and old 1GB HDD) Over the years we have changed the motherboard, power supply, RAM, graphics card and CD ROM — only the casing, CPU and floppy disc drive are original.
For just a bit more, we got a P4 2.8 GHz machine with 256MB RAM (added in another old 256MB RAM), 80GB HDD, CD ROM and a Palit 6200 256MB graphics card. Amazing how the prices of PC components have come down over the years. However he is still using his old Samsung 15″ LCD monitor which cost about RM1K a few years back. Needless to say, he is delighted with the upgrade. It’s rather ironical that has the faster CPU in the house when the kiddie games he plays only need low-end machines. We still use Win ME as some of his games are pretty old and might have problems running on WinXP, and it is much faster to restore a disc image of his C drive. (see Computer Wars) The upgrade came just in time as well for a birthday present, as he turns 17 this Sunday.