Well, good bye Shuttle XPC. We hardly knew you. Thanks to an emergency computer situation at my mom’s, Shuttle XPC had to go over and run TurboTax (which requires at least W2K now). The installer was giving my mom an error message that it didn’t support Windows 98. I kept saying try it again — why does it think you have Windows 98? Doh! Because her seven-year-old Shuttle PC does run WIndows 98. So XPC is now at mom’s and TurboTax is happy. One nifty thing about Shuttle’s SB86i case is the easily-accessible space at the top for 2 hard drives. I was able to pop mom’s old IDE drive into the empty spot, s-t-r-e-t-c-h an extra IDE cable around and get the whole thing working with all her files in 2 minutes flat. Nice.
Thanks to VMWare’s terrific Fusion program on my Intel-based iMac, and perhaps the release of a Mac version of Civilization IV, I was barely using old Mister Shuttle XPC much at all. Luckily, I built him last September mostly for fun with spare parts and cheap bits. So I’ve just started collecting again. In the closet, I start with an extra Sony CD/DVD writing drive and a Maxtor 160 GD Sata II hard drive.
Last year’s project entailed answering seven questions. Some things haven’t changed — I’ll still probably use Newegg.com as my supplier of choice, for example, and I’m still grabbing parts out of the closet. But everything else is wide open. For example, the ASUS T3 all-in-one line looks better and cheaper than any Shuttle offering in the same price range. It’s well under $200, has gigabit ethernet and a built-in flash memory card reader. I’m also leaning towards a switch to a dual-core AMD chip instead of an Intel dual core due to massive price savings. The low end of the new “Brisbane” line of Athlon 64 X2 chips is just $72 versus almost twice that for a starter Intel Core 2 Duo. And the T3 line doesn’t support Intel’s latest so I’d have to spend more for the box as well.
For an operating system, maybe it’s time to try Vista? I could re-install W2K but the license is technically in use over at mom’s. Plus there was the whole big hard drive nonsense last time resulting in some annoying partitioning. Vista is brand new with plenty of kinks but this is hardly a mission-critical system. And I feel pretty ignorant about how Vista operates. As the chief information technology officer for my house, my extended family and my in-laws, it’s only a matter of time before someone buys a new PC with Vista and starts asking questions.
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