Information Technology

Processing images with my current notebook (1.6 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM) finally is a real pain in the ass. Having the RAW converter render some JPEGs while the HDR software performs tonemapping, it becomes impossible to do image editing or even browse the web at the same time, as the mouse pointer only moves stutteringly like in those “good old days”. In addition, my 160 GB disk is almost full. My computer usage history documents the years where I got a PC (for the use as a workstation, not counting those few boxes for my server and firewalling experiments): 1995, 1998 and 2001; the notebook’s from 2004. So, it’s about time for an upgrade.

When I first thought about whether it should be a notebook again, I noticed that I don’t use my current notebook “on the road” anyway. And notebooks don’t have the computing power of dedicated desktop machines.

Nerds who buy a new PC every year are probably surprised that a Linux geek like me gets along with that few hardware upgrades. Well, my strategy is more like: Buy rarely, but wisely. I don’t feel well when messing around on a productive machine that is supposed to work; just a matter of experience. Thus, I select the components for my new PC carefully and according to my demands: Fast, multi-core, RAM expandable, good disk size, RAID-1, average good GPU, and—very important—silent operation. The price for the box should traditionally be around EUR 1,500 (formerly ATS 20,000). These are now my considerations: