Well, to continue my saga about the PC, I recently got my fixed PC back but it has been gutted completely. If you remember, I took it in to upgrade the DVD drive and the video card just to get better and faster video editing work done.

BUT…

I was told the Motherboard was faulty, and had to have it replaced. Given that the computer was nearly four years old, I was lucky to find a compatible mother board. Then I had to have the VGA card upgraded, but the first one wouldn’t work at all with the mother board. It was quite a saga, as the repair shop replaced everything until they concluded that the VGA board was at fault (too cheap?). So they ordered a more expensive one, it worked.

I added a Sony DVD Burner as well as 512MB of Ram. Again, I’d shot for 1GB, but was told that I couldn’t … not enough slots! I thought Atlantic City didn’t have that problem!

And I replaced the hard drive with a newish one…

So, all in all, a new PC basically: motherboard, VGA card (ASUS N7600GS), Hard Disk, DVD burner, memory. Only the original case, the RAM, and the power supply are left!

Who knew it would be so much trouble? And the damage, NT$8,500, all in. But at least I managed to roll my PC back to XP SP1. It was so much snappier before I did the ‘right’ thing, and allowed M$ to update my software. Now, I don’t do that any more, despite the risk of being ‘attacked’. For my own needs, I decided that the risk of being ‘hacked’ was (if I surfed carefully) far less of a problem than a sluggish PC with numerous hotfixes and updates.

But that’s just my experience.