I hardly can image needing more grafix power for my work here, and definately it’s a BIG shame that a $500 card can’t output 2 signals at 1680×1050 with a decent signal quality…

THIS was the best single hardware component upgraded EVER EVER on this PC , the previous PC and I guess the 5 PCs before… all going back to the 386 DX40 I had 15 years ago …

So – WHERE is the damn bottleneck in my system still (and i’m sticking with XP)

• 2 GB RAM – naah … even if I run HUGE SEO reports and all the office crap, dozens of documents and do photoshopping I hardly scratch at the 2GB level… I might take another 2GB .. but just because it doesn’t hurt to have them… nah, it’s not a bottleneck

• a 64 MEG Graphics card? no way dude… it’s running fine… no desktop application ever needs more, unless you run more than 3200 × 1000 pixels desktop or so… so if you get that Apple 32” Display ( which I thought about ) you need a special DVI connector feature on your card… be warned… IMHO only some highend ATI cards support that interface for PCs … and I guess you read what I think about ATI now … and BTW – the 32” display simply won’t fit with my current desk situation…

• an Athlon XP 3000 ?? ( I think that’s the name, heck, who cares… ) ...

– well, it could be faster…. and I think when I run those extremely bad programmed flash games or calculators here in Opera, which rocks when it comes to browsing fast, but sucks when it comes to executing Java and Flash (which both suck anyway) then I could need some more CPU cycles processed per second… hell.. I’d go with a Quad-Core… the Clovertown CPU – a single one – in my new server replaces what TWO dual Dual-Core Opterons implemented last April could handle… where I ran 50 projects on that dual-dual, I now run more than 100 on the clowertown… so I might want that for my desktop too, just in case :-D

• a 10k RPM disk …. hmmm …

* I’m waiting for bootup
* I’m waiting for startup and processing of Outlook handling my 5-6 GB mail files
* I’m waiting for disk indexing and file search
* heck, I’m even waiting for browsing when the damn browser tries to lookup files cached locally that it could get often faster via the 12 Mbit line here…

So I found that Seagate got this new 15k RPM disk.. a 2.5” disk with SAS interface… Savvio 15k – and I think I fell in love… the problem – it’s a real server disk… I mean it will be LOUD... the product specs didn’T even mention the noise it generates…

With my exisitng Raptor 10k SATA2 disk, I got a real desktop drive… and while it’s running great at 10k rpm, which is ALREADY 50% more speed than those damns 7200 or 5400 disks you buy in your cheapo desktop or notebook… BUT – it’s optimized for speed… I can hardly hear it…

Now I’m sitting here and actually want to optimize all but the last bit of speed for my desktop… and I’m willing to pay good $ for that!

Why? Well I’m spending 12+ hours per day here… the human-machine interface is the only real threat to my performance… 12 hours are

43200 seconds… chances are VERY VERY GOOD, that I already spent 2000 seconds waiting… maybe 3000 … hell, then we are at ONE HOUR almost that I waiting for my device here…

the Savvio 15k would be thest possible disk for me… I read it’s even 12% faster than the other 15k rpm disks… I want one

Did you see that 2.9ms average random access time on the .pdf? Samsung Spinpoint SP120 250GB has 14.5ms. ‘nuff said.

that means it’s f*ckin FIVE TIMES faster in accessing my mail file in randonm than the average cheap destop disk…. grrr..

and obviously I don’T want the 10.1krpm version, cause as you read here my current RAPTOR outperforms the 10k version in almost everything interesting… but it’s even more silent…

Well – so what have we learnt?

The ONLY thing that I would like to upgrade is my disk subsystem…. to a disk where not even the manufacturer writes about it’s noise… a disk that BTW is not available in the whole EU, not to mention Austria… LOL

Well – I guess it’s time to go to bed and dream of the perfect desktop hardware… hardware NOT limiting my thoughts or even costing me time for waiting for IT… any proposals for THE hardward config are warmly welcome

Or guess what – maybe I’ll try an Imac next time… at least THEY do have a graphics driver for their mega-display… and I bet they have a migration tool for outlook too … and the new ones got 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duos and can even run sucky Windows in a shell…. =:-D

PS: but then when I look the these Apple MacPro specs I find that Mr Steve Jobs got 4 different drive options… and they ALL run on 7200 rpm … nah… I guess that’s just sweet design, but sucky performance till then…