i have actully won the Battle of The Computer™ this time! i bought a used 64mb AGP video card (for $15) and installed it, and now my monitor actually does higher resolution than it did with my previous mother board. i can crank it all the way up to 1600×1200 without any problem at all, although i’m pretty happy with 1280×1024 because of the fact that i have to squint to see it at any higher resolution.
please note, for all you people that bought brand new computers recently: i am running the same processor and memory that i had 10 years ago, with a modern operating system, and instead of spending anywhere from $500 to $2,500 or more for a fancy new box, 7 years ago, i built this computer from bits and pieces that i had lying around from other, dead machines, i have recently spent a grand total of $75 and i’ve got a computer that kicks ass! it’s got adequate audio (for someone who composes and records his own music), more than adequate video, and standard network capabilities, and i only spent $75 for the whole thing. admittedly, recently, i had to wade through a week of misery to get here, but all in all, i think it was entirely worth it.
re-pc rocks, although they actually require payment to recycle most computer parts, a phenomenon which i don’t completely understand (if they’re selling used computer parts, why do they also require that you pay when you want to recycle computer parts?). i don’t think they have a tacoma location, but there’s one in tukwilla and one in seattle.
At least some of that supreme ability, I suspect, is that you’re running an excellent operating system that is fairly low on requirements for processor and video for just about everything. It’s really only games and memory-intensive applications that require top-of-the-line materials all the time.
I think I like this Re-PC place. Maybe I could get a nice sound card from them for inexpensively, so that I can return to having a card for which all the inputs work, so that I don’t have to plug my TV tuner into the microphone port, but can instead put it in a working auxilliary port. Or from some other computer-type store, but having a nice sound card would be a plus for me.