Robs New Computer

I recently took it upon myself to upgrade my computer system at home. While I was running a reasonably powered machine, giving me few, if any, complaints on its day to day operation, however I was beginning to feel a nip of anxiety on the gaming front. Being that my then current system was close to 5 years old it was sporting a VGA graphics slot and a few PCI's, but no PCIe's, so essential for today's upper end cards.

So I figured what the hell, I found a nice little machine online for a really decent price and jumped for it. I can't say as I have any regrets, but I was forced to wonder at the current philosophy of design teams.

The new computer, a refurbished eMachine, was sporting a dual core 2.1 processor with 3GB of RAM and the requisite expansion ports needed for juicing up a gaming rig, exactly what I was looking for as I had hardware waiting for the job. I waited with anticipation for the new computer to show.

Upon first examination of the machine I was surprised to see it was running a 32 bit copy of Vista, not a big deal, but a but surprising for a multi core machine. I decided that it must have been a throwback to the early days of multi-cores when you still saw some 32 bit processors, not a big deal as I was planning on putting Windows 7 in anyway. Big question I had was, why put 3GB of Ram on a system that could only read 2? A bit of a Draconian interpretation of driver needs I thought.

A couple hours later we were running a shiny new copy of 64 bit Windows 7 and it was time to start looking at the hardware. I cracked the case open and was surprised to see how few expansion slots were present, 1 PCI and 1 PCIe (the PCI was actually sporting a modem, how 1990's of them). I dropped in my video card, courtesy of my best buddy guy, and, upon power up, was greeted with a squealing BIOS alarm. A quick examination showed the need for external power on the card; a second quick examination revealed that my power supply didn't have the necessary 6 pin power plug needed for a PCIe card! Furthermore it only had 2 SATA power leads, so how was I supposed to power the second hard drive I was going to install? Software aside, why give hardware expansion capabilities you can't provide for?

Over the course of two hours of Googling and stripping parts form other computers in the house I finally decided I need a new power supply. While other options exist, adapters and other hardware, the kicker was finding the machine only had a 250W power supply anyway. A trip to Future Shop (more on them later) sported a new 450W power supply, complete with a 24 pin motherboard connector, a 6 pin PCIe, an 8 pin PCIe for future needs, and enough SATA and 4 pin connections to allow me to slave in a 1TB drive and a second DVD burner. By the time I drop in the 4rth gig of RAM I've ordered it'll have cost me a bit more than I was hoping to spend, but not as bad as it could have been (thank god I do my own work).

Leaving me with the initial question, who built this thing? My educated guess is a team who was told, we have these left over parts and licenses, make something that will move them out the door.

This is why so many people get frustrated with their computers, if you try to buy on a budget the equipment is usually underpowered and the user is under qualified to diagnose it, let alone fix it. If you decide to not worry about the budget and just buy what you need you get screwed over badly on the price. Goes to show the old adage still stands: Buyer beware!