Fair enough

So I went to a computer fair today. In all honesty it wasn't as spectacular as I could have hoped. When my Dad and I pulled up to the Holiday Inn it was at, he said, "The place isn't mobbed, that's a bad sign."

Overall, I wouldn't call the experience bad, but in the future I should probblay make certain I'm going to a far larger and varied fair.

In any case, the one I attended was very small. The entire fair could have probably fit in my house (even in its current state). As such the variety of goods wasn't spectacular, and so to the options for payment. Whether a function of the lack of competition between vendors, or from some other source, the meaty stuff I really had hoped to save money on was on average fifty dollars more expensive than the best deal online. The only items you could really save money are floppy drives, CD and DVD drives, and CRT monitors. Everything else was pretty pricey.

All I ended up getting was a DVD/CD drive. The floppy and monitor are going to be coming from my aunt's computer which I will surely cannibalize upon recieving it. Since neither is really necessary at the moment, it's not important that I have them now (I'll be borrowing one of my Dad's monitors until then).

So, upon returning home I spent two hundred and seventy dollars at newegg.com on a motherboard, memory, and a processor (with heatsink and fan). For an encore, I won a copy of Windows XP (OEM) off of ebay for seventy dollars. With those in the bag, the only missing components will be the four hard drives I need to do RAID 0+1 with.

For four hard drives from newegg, it'd be another two hundred dollars (ironically, that number doesn't change for twenty, forty or eighty gigabyte sets). Because I know I can do better on ebay, I've turned my focus there.

In any case, the sum total I'll have spent on hardware for this thing will probably end up being five hundred dollars. That's not bad at all. For a non-proprietary system that will kick the rear of any proprietary system (each your heart out Dell), it's darn good.

Most importantly, it'll give me some good experience in understanding the hardware relationships in a computer, and give me something to develop on in the future. The fact that it should be able to play most recent video games decently as well is merely icing on the cake.

Anyway, I hope to someday go to a halfway decent computer fair, which I don't think the one I visited today qualifies as.