Got a new computer

Last weekend I finally got around to doing something I’d wanted to do for a long time: I built myself a new computer, which I’d never done before. It was awesome, and it freakin’ worked, so here’s how it went down.

Over the last year or so I had noticed my old eMachines (a T2858, now with several upgrades) was slowing down severely. The worst culprit was iTunes, which sucked because I use two iPods on a regular basis and am frequently loading new podcasts and songs onto them. Plus there was some problem with the drivers where after I’d plugged in an iPod once or twice, it would no longer recognize anything I plugged in to a USB port, so I was constantly restarting the thing to reset the count. I eventually completely reinstalled Windows and everything, which took hours, but the drivers worked fine…until the next tiny update to iTunes a couple weeks later, when it all went right back to being awful again. Thanks, Apple! That was frustrating. Plus some video-streaming sites, like the NBC Olympics site and the incomparable Hulu, were getting choppy. Clearly it was time for an upgrade.

So for Christmas I asked everyone for cash and was getting ready to make the move. But in January Microsoft came out with a free beta version of Windows 7, which I started using on a computer at work, and it is awesome. So good, in fact, that I refused to buy a copy of the inferior XP or Vista to hold me over, since I knew I’d be getting 7 the day it comes out. On June 26, Microsoft started offering free upgrades to 7 with some new PCs and some new copies of Vista. All right, that’s good enough.

A couple days later I ordered everything, and it all arrived last Thursday in two boxes.

The large box is my case, an Antec Three Hundred, and everything else is in that other one. Pity the poor girl at my apartment complex who carried it all out at once to me (the UPS tracker put the case box at 19 lbs. and the other at 14). Here’s what was in the other box:

See that wad of packing wrap? That’s my hard drive. You know, the thing that holds all my songs and family pictures and everything that actually matters about a computer. But it survived the shipping process just fine. I had nothing else to do that night, which was great, so I dove in.

The first thing you do is open up the case and install the motherboard. Mine’s an Asus M4A78 Plus, and it’s awesome: supports two graphics cards, up to 16 gigs of RAM, and the latest AMD processors. It also has 9 USB 2.0 ports on the back, which is good because I ran out of USBs on my old PC, but also bad. See, there’s a small panel on the back of the case for the ports, which didn’t match up with my motherboard. That’s okay because the board comes with a panel of its own. But it had these tiny little metal tabs around most of the ports, and I couldn’t figure out if they were supposed to go around the ports, or to the side of them, or what. They had a little spring to them that was pushing the board away from the case. Google wasn’t much help, either. I ended up pulling them all off, which took a while, and I plunged the next-to-penultimate one into my thumb, which bled like crazy. But that ended up being the hardest part of the whole job. Once the tabs were off it was easy to clip the panel to the case and slide the motherboard into the right place.

While I was struggling with the board’s back panel, I decided to put the processor in the board before installing it in the case. For the processor I got an AMD Phenom II X3 710, a triple-core processor that runs at 2.6 GHz. Newegg had it for just $99, which was twenty bucks cheaper than their lowest-priced Intel Core 2 Duo. Perhaps from my days as an old Apple guy, I’ve never really liked Intel, and felt like supporting the underdog anyway. For the price this AMD can’t be beat, and it’s handled everything I’ve thrown at it with ease (more on that later). Also, installing a processor is crazy easy; you just lift this arm off the board, drop the processor into the pins, and then push the arm back down, which takes a little more pressure than you might think.

Once you have the board in the right place, you just screw it down into some standoffs with screws that came with the case…easy as cake.

Next I started installing the other components: the power supply, the drives, and the RAM. I got a 530W Rosewill power supply, a 640-gig Western Digital hard drive (I’m only using like one hundred of that, but it was only ten bucks more than a 320 GB drive), and 4 gigs of Kingston RAM. I always use Kingston. For some reason Newegg was out of stock on most of its DVD burners, but my old computer was willing to go under the knife to give the new guy his. Prepping for surgery, with the old fella on the left:

The last piece  was the graphics card, a 512 MB HIS Radeon HD 4670. The video card alone on this computer has as much memory as my whole old computer did when I got it…I love progress. Anyway, it’s sort of a mid-ish-range card for games, but accelerates HD video playback quite nicely. I didn’t want to go all out on the GPU now because I care about exactly one upcoming PC game, StarCraft 2, and don’t know yet what kind of card that will need. I’ll worry about an upgrade later if I need to. High-end cards usually require their own connector straight to the power supply and a lot of space. This one doesn’t need a power connector, but it’s still massive. It’s the blue card & fan set-up. You can also see the motherboard under it, the huge heatsink and fan on top of the processor, the RAM just to the right of the CPU, and the DVD drive and hard drive mounted in the case, with the solid black power supply at the bottom:

With everything in place, I started hooking the wires together. I’ve upgraded a lot of computer components over the years, but never really done this part, so I was slightly worried. This was way easier than I’d expected; the connectors are all different enough that you can tell what matches with what. Plus the case has space to the side of the hard drive bays (see above) you can route cables through and tie them up in, which is very nice. I got it all plugged in, carried it over to my desk, said a little prayer, and hit the power button. Thankfully, it turned right on.

The last step was installing Windows (in this case, the 64-bit Vista Home Premium edition) and the rest of my software and files. The first time I booted up Windows, it sucked, because it didn’t have a driver for anything. Thus my network connection felt slow, my video was stuck on a low resolution, etc., etc. Fortunately I could install the drivers off the motherboard and graphics card discs. Wish I had done this before I connected to the Internet for the first time, because it had already started downloading Windows updates as well. So when I had to reboot for all the changes to take effect, I had to wait forever for those Windows updates to finish. The next time I started it up, though, everything ran great.

So does it solve my problems?

64-bit iTunes runs beautifully. My nano now syncs in like three seconds flat. The first couple times I checked on it, I was like, what do you mean it’s done already? The iPhone still takes a couple minutes (does a complete backup & then syncs a bunch of stuff each time) but at least it’s all super reliable now. I was annoyed that iTunes on Windows had slowed down so much over the years, and thought maybe Apple was up to something sinister, but I’m very pleased now. And forget the conspiracy theories, because I like iTunes on Windows way more than Microsoft Office on the Mac. (Then again, I didn't even like Office on Windows until version 2007 anyway.)

The video? That’s a breath of fresh air, too. Flash video, such as the kind used on YouTube and Hulu, is almost entirely CPU-dependent. So I just wanted to make sure I could make Hulu high-res and full-screen, and it worked great. Later I decided to really crank it up. I started a Daily Show episode on Hulu, which of course was fine. Then I opened up a 720p Windows Media-format Halo 3 trailer, and that ran fine at the same time. Then I started streaming a 1080p Star Trek trailer off of Apple’s site. Three videos, two streaming, and once the Star Trek one buffered and started playing I checked and my CPU was only running at 40%. I then started Windows Flip 3D, a feature of Vista and 7 and  an Exposé-ripoff that lets you cycle through your open windows in a three-dimensional view. So I started flipping through all of these and all the videos and sound were playing perfectly smoothly.

So yeah. It’s good enough for me. Also, Vista works fine on this thing; I’ve never seen it use so much as two gigs of RAM, and it’s been very stable once it was all set up. So, yeah. That’s my new PC.