I have to confess to someone before my wife finds out!

My current PC is a laptop inherited some time ago from my daughter when she went off to university and deemed it a completely socially unacceptable embarrassment. Of course she had to have a new one. It would be so humiliating otherwise etc etc
It had replaced my previous 5-year old laptop whose motherboard had progressively been failing - first the sound, then the USB ports ...

Anyway the other night I decided a man of my collar-size deserved more than second-hand cast-offs. In a moment of complete hysteria I spec'd up and ordered a brand-new PC. Just for me. Because I'm worth it.

I'n now awaiting the build and delivery of the following system -
i5 2550K overclocked to 4.9GHz
Noctua NH-D14 cooler
16GB RAM
120GB solid-state drive
1TB secondary HD
2GB Radeon 6970 graphics
etc

Do you think this will run CATraxx OK?

How do I smuggle this in to the house without alerting the other half?
Luckily we're approaching spring & summer in the Northern Hemisphere. No doubt when I plug it in and run it it will be pumping lots of heat out in to the house. I think I can get away with saying the resulting rise in temperature is just the seasons changing.

Yesterday I told the 16-year old son of one of my friends about this purchase. I think I could reasonably say he was jealous. Which pleased me. However to relieve his pangs of desire a little I told him it was just an example of the classic computer paradox: by the time people can afford to buy systems like this they are already too old and slow to use them to their full potential. He just nodded glumly. "That is so very true", he agreed.
Oh thanks, I thought, you didn't even try to soften the blow, did you, kid?

Regards

Ken

Yes, though to be sure..send me one too!

Enjoy the new technology!

{Several days later …}

Wow, so this is what the 21st century is all about!
Not only is CATraxx so much smoother and faster, everything else is just whizzo too. I used to criticise my Squeezebox server software for being slow and drawn-out in browsing, scrolling, selecting etc, but now it just flies along. I'm a long-standing BOINC fan and I'm amazed at how fast my new PC gobbles up the work packets from these projects. I've even started playing around with fractals again (aahh, memories of writing an interpreted BASIC program about 25 years ago to draw the Mandelbrot set) and it's incredible what's available these days. I might even dust down some old POV-Ray scene files I've got somewhere and see how they run.

When I received the PC all the packing looked good on the outside. However once I started possessively running my hands over its sleek black case I thought "Hmm, that side panel doesn't seem quite flush – there's a gap of about 2mm in the middle." Closer examination showed that one of the retaining screws at the rear end appeared to have been forced in at an angle and the overlapping lip had been pulled in to place to make it look as though it fitted. Oh dear, my heart sank. I removed the side panel (yes, I earthed myself first) and was amazed. The fans and heatsinks on the CPU were enormous. They stood upright in the case, and the larger of the two fans – about 15cm diameter – appeared to have been clipped to its heatsink just a little too high. The fan shroud stood proud of the case itself by the couple of mm that caused the problem when fitting the side panel. Despite having hands like power shovels I began attempting to unclip the fan, reseat it and clip it in place a little lower down on the heatsink. In the cramped confines of the PC this was like me doing brain surgery while wearing boxing gloves. Despite all the odds against it, the patient survived and was soon humming away nicely.

I then wrote a pleasant but ultimately disappointed e-mail to the company who'd built the PC. This was after 5:00pm and I expected at best a reply the following day. Within 10 minutes I had a response from the Support Manager. He offered profuse apologies and asked if I had any images they could use to help investigate the cause of the problem. I had to hang my head in shame and admit that I'm the last man left in W. Europe who doesn't own a camera. Even my phone is so old it's just a phone. He must have accepted this explanation as about 30 minutes later I got another e-mail, this time from the Sales Director. He too offered apologies and, as a gesture of reconciliation, said he had arranged to ship a free-of-charge upgraded sound card to me. He'd checked my order and spotted that I appeared to by relying on the on-board sound chip on the motherboard. He assured me this would be a very beneficial improvement. He even went so far as to claim to use this model of card himself.

I was genuinely delighted by this service. OK, they had made an error in assembling the PC and that should never have happened. But as it turns out the error was recoverable and so far appears to have had no adverse effects. Their reaction was good: they acknowledged the error, apologised for it, and then offered what for them must have been a relatively cheap token of compensation. And it was all handled and complete less than an hour after my original e-mail.

Anyway I think this PC should see me through to Windows 15 or thereabouts. (Did I hear someone muttering about never needing more than 640K of RAM or 10MB of hard disk space?)

Regards

Ken