Some people are able to keep the same computer for 4 or 5 years before buying a new one. I am not one of those people. I have a desktop-style computer at home that I call my “server”. I opened the cover a few years back, and have never got around to putting it fully back on. I am always in there, tweaking stuff.

You see, prices keep falling. A 200GB hard drive now retails for about $120 CDN. That's ridiculously low. You can get 512MB of memory for $50. How can you not buy that if you could use it? I see these prices fall - week after week - and sometimes I can't help myself but buy something cheap.

Yesterday I bought a 19 inch LCD monitor (BenQ T903, $450 CDN) and a new video card (GeForce FX 5500, $199 CDN) to match. The 19 inch LCD is a monster - huge screen real estate like I've never seen before. I run the thing in 1280 x 1024 mode. Web pages that used to scroll now take up only half the screen. I run a dual-monitor setup - but now I wonder if I need too. With a screen that large, you can realistically do a couple of things on the same screen.

I'm not a big “gamer”, so the video card I bought was chosen because (a) it supports dual-monitor and (b) it wasn't too expensive. I wouldn't buy the cheapest card I could find, but somewhere in the middle between the low and high end. I ran some 3DMark 2001 tests on the old and new cards, and it looks like just over twice as fast as my old card.

The downside to all this upgrading I do is that I now have computer parts lying all over my home office. I have three extra video cards, two extra CD-RW drives, one extra hard drive, 4 extra SDRAM memory cards, 1 extra laserjet printer, 1 extra scanner, 1 extra 17 inch monitor... I mean, I can open a second hand computer store.

I am hesistant to throw this stuff out - as it still has “some” value. 128MB RAM used to be worth a lot of money - and is still $50 new in Best Buy.

Anyways, the one thing I can't upgrade (and that I might need to soon) is the CPU. 1GHz Pentium 3 is just not cutting it any more. It's probably holding back the performance more than anything at this point.