So... Shiny's box finally blew up. It crapped out Thursday evening, I believe... it's not surprising, really, since it was like 5+ years old. She was rocking a core2duo e6300 and motherboard from that era, though she'd upgraded or replaced a lot of parts since then.

I'd happened to take a half day off on Friday to chill, but ended up building her a new box instead. Got it up and running after 1 bad motherboard and ~4 hours of assembly. After that it took several more hours installing O/S and updates. So, her new box:

core i5 3450 (ivy bridge)
16 GB DDR3 RAM @ 1600mhz
Gigabyte H77M-D3H motherboard
new case (Antec Sonata)
new power supply (Antec 620W)
Geforce GTX-465 gfx card (my old one - rescued from last pc)
60GB SSD (rescued from last pc)
whatever regular hd she had (also rescued)

The box rocks. You go from pushing the power button to the win7 log on screen in about 9 seconds. Hopefully this'll last her another 5-6 years. Total out-of-pocket cost was about $500-600, which isn't bad considering most of the PC was new parts.

That's not a lot of money for a very good machine, so nicely done. I bet the SSD was the most expensive part by a longshot anyway right? The only thing I could imagine being more expensive is the GFX card and you salvaged that too so...

My next PC will totally feature a SSD. All this talk about superfast booting and loading is way too sexy. Besides by the time I actually build anything new they'll be a lot cheaper/better anyway.

Yea with an ssd you have a responisve pc in 19 seconds. No more sandwiches while waiting for the pc to boot.

I bought the SSD for Shiny several months ago when I saw a sale on Newegg. At the time, it was ~$55 for a 60GB SSD... since it broken the $1/GB threshold, I snatched it up. Nowadays, you can find SSDs for half that price... 50 cents per GB is a damned good deal.

The SSD in my box is older... it has TRIM, but it's not SATA 3 compatible, nor does it have the 500MB/s + transfer speeds. I plan on waiting a few months for my cash situation to rebound and then get a ~512GB SATA 3 SSD. By then that'll hopefully be under $200.

You know I have to toss a thank you towards Satis. Not only did he buy me the new box he built it. I was having a super crappy week (my car also died, etc.) and well he made things much better even with all my depressed self at the time. Love you!

We all love Satis. His manly musk permeates even through the intarwebz!

I'm actually considering building a new PC here (with an SSD etc) instead of importing my desktop from Belgium. It does seem like it would be super decadent though...the other ones if just fine and sitting there wasting away. I'll have to check the parts prices here and my bank account before I make a decision on this.