I'm finally upgrading my potato

[thistlechaser]

While my computer is only a couple years ago, apparently I either bought at a bad time or (more likely) my lack of knowledge did me in. I have just a regular hard drive in it, which means in online games, I'm already far far behind. You need a SSD for fastest zoning.

People with a SSD zone near instantly/in seconds. I take multiple minutes.

I've been thinking about upgrading for months, but what held me back was that I didn't know what I should get (beyond "must have SSD"). I know building your own machine is best, but I don't feel comfortable doing that. We were talking about it online, and I was told that there are services that will do it for you, for basically the same price as making it yourself. Sold!

Poking about the site, I decided on this one: Gamer Infinity 8800 Pro with a few customizations. It's not their most powerful gaming one, but it should be a major upgrade for me. (Currently I get 15-30 FPS, the new one will give me 261 even with max settings.)

It's a desktop machine, which I realized meant I needed another monitor (I got spoiled with my laptop's second one), so I headed over to Amazon and ordered another of the ones I currently use. This one.

Now I just have to wait. It will take 8 business days for them to ship out my PC, and it comes by ground, so I probably won't get it to the end of the month-ish.

My current computer is acting up, so I hope it lasts that long. It'll be nice to be able to make the switch between machines at my own pace, with both of them running, instead of trying to fumble through it after the old one died. The old one just has to last long enough to let that happen!

Comments

[orangerful.livejournal.com]

Wow that computer looks fancy. :) My PC has been chugging along but Tim bought a SSD last year and now I am envious. Keep waiting for a lightning deal on NewEgg then I'm gonna have him upgrade me LOL. It only really matters for Sims which makes my computer freak out and takes forever to load...not even sure it would help that.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Look fancy to me, too! I hope it really is. :P

I think it should help for Sims -- as far as I understand it, it should make everything work faster and better. Fingers crossed, for both of us!

[doxxxicle.livejournal.com]

Dude! You're not getting a Dell! ;)

Apologies in advance if any of the following is obvious...

Since the SSD will be 240GB, you'll have to make some choices about what you store on it vs the 2TB (spinning rust) HDD. The OS will preinstalled on the SSD and you should install whatever games and programs you want to be speedy on the SSD as well.

However, you should store media files (music, videos, photos, etc.) on the HDD. They take up a lot of space and you don't need very fast access to them.

You may also want to consider setting up an automated backup to the HDD of important files that are irreplaceable or difficult to recreate, e.g. game addon settings, documents, photos, etc. Even better would be to backup to an external drive plugged in via USB. I use a backup program called CrashPlan -- ostensibly it's a "backup to the cloud" program but it also allows you to use other drives in your computer as a backup destination free of charge.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

No apologies needed! I've never had a machine with two drives before, so it's helpful to know.

I do have an external drive to back up to, and your comment made me remember that YET AGAIN I forgot all weekend to do the backup. Especially since my old machine is having issues, I really, really need to get that done.

So nervous! I wish it would hurry up and get here so I'd know everything is okay with it. :)

[doxxxicle.livejournal.com]

This is why I automate my backups, because I have a terrible memory. Any decent backup software (Windows Backup included) will allow you to schedule backups, and the good ones will do incremental backups that only store the stuff that has changed since the last backup.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Oh hrm, I've been doing it by hand all this time. Automating it sounds like a much, much better way to go. I'll look into that, thanks!