Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic





	[quote name="Quinn DeAngelo"]You may want to consider buying a refurbished computer and maybe adding parts, often you can get fairly good equipment at a big discount. Don't forget, most computers, if they fail, they fail in the first couple of months, after that, they're usually obsolete before they fail again. The biggest contributor to MTBF is cycling. Most people are leaving their computers on 24/7 and are not cycling them so the potential for failure goes way down. I think over the last ten years my computers have been on continuously for months at a time - the only reason they get shut off is I'm going to be gone more than 3 days or we have a power failure - and unless I do an install or an upgrade requires rebooting sometimes it's months between reboots. I'd recommend a Quad Core rather than Dual Core, the difference in cost is not that significant (unlike, say, the difference between a 21 inch monitor and a 23 inch.) As far as audio, I've never had a hum problem with any onboard audio I use and I buy cheap speakers ($6 kind) or cheap headphones ($4 kind). About the only thing you might have a problem with is the video. Considering how video hungry most games are, the highest-end standard video card is probably in range, although it burns my ass to figure having to buy a refurbished computer for maybe $300 and spend another $200 on a high-end card. If you are going to build it yourself, go with a 64-bit multicore, and go with at least 4 cores, not two, so the machine will last a while. Max out the memory, if it will handle 8, put in 8, if it can handle 16 gig, put in 16. I'd recommend putting in a media reader but you can often buy one that hooks up via USB and reads everything around for $10. Minimum six USB ports, have some front and back. Audio/microphone jack front and back. For the drive, if you can get a blu-ray writer under $150, get it so you'll be ahead of the curve since then you can watch and write blu ray and it downgrades to DVD and CD. As for drive space, I suggest the following. 1 or 2 gig, and get an NAS that you can just plug into your router, you can get one in the 1GB size for around $125. Put anything you'd access on multiple computers on the NAS. They've got the things well designed, the box is about the size of a paperback book, plugs into a power socket and the router, and you access it through a web browser. You give it a name and it just looks like another computer on the network. Store the stuff you need to have but don't want to make multiple copies. Or if files are critical you could buy a couple smaller drives and RAID them into a secure array, although I think simply having files backed up on another drive probably solves the problem of potential loss and might be less expensive. [/quote]