Puck’s Blog

A month ago Toren told me he was getting a new computer.  Now when I hear that, I think “Oh good, a nice fast new computer that you buy from a store or in parts and build,” but no, he meant that someone was giving him their old computer for free, so it was new-to-him. 

I’ve got this weird thing about computers that goes completely the opposite to the rest of my life:  they have to be set up properly and cleanly with the right software, antivirus and utilities.  I guess I’m digitally anal-retentive.  In the same way that Omorachel has a desire to clean my house, I have a desire to keep my friends’ computers clean.  So I told Toren that when he gets it, he should let me get it all set up properly for him.  He finally got it last week and I took a look at it on Sunday.  It’s a Duron 850 with 128 MB RAM.  Not a terrible machine for what Toren usually wants to do but while I was explaining that he’d need to drop an extra 512 MB of memory in there to make it work at a decent speed he informed me that he wanted to use it to do audio recording and editing for his voice work, as well as mixing music.  I started doing the math for that, realizing he’d need not only the more memory, but a better sound card, much bigger hard drive and it’d still be slow.

So then, with his blessing, I priced out the parts for a whole new computer.  Total:  Just shy of $700 with tax for everything he needs.  To my incredible surprise he said “Ok, let’s do it.”  I had to ask him who he really was and what he’d done with the real Toren Atkinson who not only wouldn’t have that kind of money, but would also never spend it.  “I have a job now,” he explained as though that is a reason for someone’s inherent personality traits to change.  Bah!  Something is going on here, and I will know the truth.

But I digress…

I picked up the parts from NCIX yesterday and built the system, formatted the hard drive, installed the OS and then got all the security updates and installed a bevy of free (and free-ish) utilities and software.  Then I gave him some of my old games.

So Toren has gone from his old Pentium 2-400 (?) to a new Athlon 64 3000+ with 1GB of memory, a 250 GB hard drive and onboard Geforce 6100 video (he wanted it cheap and doesn’t care about playing games — if he ever does he can buy a better video card and turn off the onboard).  I dropped it off last night and, being me, spent most of the time showing him the games I installed for him.  I think the only one he appreciated was The Ur-Quan Masters, which is a truly free and awesome port of an old PC/3DO game that everyone should play.

Here’s the thing:  Toren’s computer is faster than MINE.  Ok, I have a much better video card and 1.5 GB of memory, but he’s got 64 bit architecture (on a 32 bit OS, though) and more speed.  It’s humbling.  I’d upgrade mine but it’s not time yet, plus I’m going to finally drop the cash on laser eye surgery.