Time to Upgrade

[gregvb]

It's Saturday and I'm work manning the Information desk.  Ick.  Fortunately, I only have to do this once a month.  It's not bad duty.  I'm generally left to my own devices, interrupted only occationally by a clueless student wanting to know where this or that is.  And I'm more than happy to tell them where to go.>:)  The downside, of course, is it

Comments

[wildcard9]

Since I am clueless on hardware, beyond "faster/larger is better", I should ask you for suggestions for when I get a new PC. I want one that can do graphics and sound better, but for Second Life and MP3 recording/editing rather than for gaming (Second Life is as close to a graphical game as I get). I know that I want to avoid Vista, and have had no problems with XP Pro on my home PCs (those that aren't still running W2K). Beyond that, I have no idea where to start specing out a new PC, or how much to expect it to cost.

[gregvb]

>I want one that can do graphics and sound better, but for Second
>Life and MP3 recording/editing

For audio editing, any current box'll do the job. Actually, any box within the past five years'll do the job. For SL, that's another story.

If you want to crank your SL graphics up to the max, your gonna need a fast Net connection and a fast graphics card. For the former, you'll have to check with your ISP.

For the latter, I recommend an nVidia card that has 512 megs on it, which is the most SL can support. Also, I suggest getting a card that uses PCI-Express, which is much faster than AGP. PCI-E 2.0 is the latest version and doubles the speed of 1.0. Of course this means your mobo has to have PCI-E as well.

OK, enough geek for now. Don't want your head to explode. :)