The Beast Rises

Posted by Stropp on December 7, 2007

The last week and a bit has been hard.

Hallucinations and the shakes. Waking in the middle of night in cold sweats. The constant projectile vomit. Dreams of dying CPUs. Even with the XBox, Cable TV, and a couple of novels, it’s been hard I tell’s ya.

Not really. I’m not that far gone… yet. It’s been more annoying than anything else. It’s amazing how much we rely on these devices, and not just for games either.

Anyway, the fix is in. A new beast rises from the ashes of the old. And it’s bigger and better, we can rebuild him…

I broke with tradition for this one though. Normally I like to source all the components and build the system up from scratch. I find this has the advantage of giving me exactly what I want, a decent reliable system. This time, with Christmas fast approaching, I decided to buy a prebuilt computer. I decided on Dell and picked a system on their website.

And what a system. I selected the XPS 720 Desktop. It’s supposedly built for gamers, and it shows. I also upgraded a few of the components. Here are the specs.

• Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600.
• 4GB 800MHz RAM
• 500GB Hard Drive
• 768MB PCI Express GeForce 8800 GTX
• DVD ROM Drive and a DVD Writer
• Windows XP Media Edition (Couldn’t get Professional, and Vista is out of the question.)

and a

• 27″ Dell Widescreen Monitor. It’s Huge!

Aside from the monitor, the first thing I noticed about the XPS 720 is that it is a monster. It’s truely massive, and as heavy as it looks. I could barely lift the box with the PC, and even out of the box the system is pretty darn heavy. I doubt if there will be any casual lugging of this guy around for LAN parties at friends places.

Of course all the crap that normally gets put on prebuilt systems these days is on there. I’ve already removed the Google toolbar from my Taskbar. (Such a stupid place to put it. What brainiac thought of that one?) and there is a bunch of other things that will get deleted when I get around to it.

The second thing I did was download my favorite browsers, Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.x. I’ve still got a few things to download. I’ve been looking into Ruby on Rails for a while, so I’ll need to get that set up again.

As for the games. Tabula Rasa is currently downloading the client, and is about 55% done. I might leave it at that for a while. I haven’t really been playing WoW, and a friend has my LotRO disks for the friend invitation.

It’ll be great to finally get rid of these tremors when Tabula Rasa finishes downloading.

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