Tech-Shopping

Durga Puja as usual was fun. Two of my aunts visited us with their family. Since most of the events are held at night I was the main driver during those days. Obviously we could not ask our driver to do an overnight duty and again come in the morning. The Puja days were over even before we realized it!! Dusshera was on 13th October and I went out shopping. I had been waiting for this kind of shopping for one long year. It is the Nehru Place shopping.

Now that the fresher was gone and the ragging has ended, I decided to purchase a new computer. On Thursday, 13th Oct I went to Nehru place alone to do a bit of market survey. There were few points in my mind:-


  • A powerful computer that would not be outdated very soon.
  • No Pentium 4, I want to get over the Pentium 4 era.
  • A good speaker is a must.
  • The mother-board should be perfectly compatible with the processor I choose.
  • RAM and hard disk should have a high capacity and speed.
  • My desire: A Sony 17” LCD monitor!!
  • To cut cost I will not buy anything that can be easily added later e.g. video/sound card.

Now with these things in mind I went out for the survey.
The configuration of the PC that I initially wanted was:-
  • Pentium Extreme Edition 3.2 GHz. This processor has dual core, supports Hyper-Threading and 64 bit computing. It is the latest one that Intel has released.
  • Intel motherboard based on Intel 955 chipset.
  • DVD Burner
  • Samsung HDD at least 120 GB
  • Kingston RAM about 2 GB
  • Sony 17” TFT LCD Monitor
  • A good multimedia keyboard and USB optical scroll mouse
  • Altec Lansing speakers
First I enquired if the processor is available or not. Most of the shops claimed that the processor did not exist!! One shop on the other hand gave me the details of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition Processor. He told me that it would be expensive, and then enquired the price of the processor to the Intel Distributor. The price shocked me: Rs. 42,000/-. F*k man, it is bloody expensive. I continued my survey but did not enquire about the processors anymore. I met Prateek Chadha in the market and we went to few more shops until he was hungry. So we went to his home for lunch. On the way I called up Maanick and asked for some advice. He recommended Pentium D and a good motherboard combination. Since Maanick also had some work in Nehru Place, he helped me with the survey after lunch. End of the day I was dead tired, went back home and celebrated Dusshera. The next day I went to Nehru Place with the cash and a configuration fixed in my mind. But unfortunately the cost of the PC did not fit in my budget. And another day was wasted.

On Saturday there was an Exun judges meeting. After the meeting (and eating) Rungta, Maanick and I went to Nehru purchase the PC. After a lot of negotiation the PC was purchased and assembled. But during assembly, at the end of the day we realized that the motherboard did not have an onboard graphics. So I was forced to go for a graphics card too. The shopping took five and a half hours. I thank Maanick for all the help during the shopping period.

The next challenge was setting it up. So I went to ‘The Rungta’s’ to set it all up. Unfortunately Mac OS could not be installed in my system. But Windows XP is running well. Thanks to Mukesh sir for the Extreme Windows CD. A new problem popped out of the box of the monitor. The monitor had one dead pixel, and I could not bear that. That had to be changed. On Monday I went to the shop and got my monitor exchanged for a different model. On Saturday I was forced to buy D.A. chip based RAM as other companies were not available. Since I do not trust that company, I got it changed too. Kingston was out of budget, so I bought Hyundai-Hynix chip based RAM.

And now my computer is rocking!! Thanks to Rungta for all the help that night (the help still continues).
The configuration of my PC is:-
  • Pentium D, 3.0 GHz
  • Intel Motherboard D955XBK
  • 512+512 MB RAM, 533 MHz
  • Samsung 160 GB HDD
  • Sony 17” TFT LCD Monitor, SDM-H75
  • Altec Lansing speakers, ATP3
  • Sony DVD±RW/±R/CD Dual Layer, DRU-810A
  • Sony 1.44” FDD
  • Microsoft Wired Keyboard 500
  • Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse
  • NVIDIA GeForce 6200 Graphics Card with TurboCache. 128 MB + 256 MB shared with the RAM

Overall an excellent system and in spite of not meeting my initial configuration, I am more than satisfied.

Since I do not have a photo of my system, here is a combined picture of all the parts of my computer.

<img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;” src=”http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6383/475/400/mycomp.jpg” border=”0” alt=”“ />