The Gizmophile

It looks like time has come to retire my wife’s old computer and build her a new one.  Her eMachine has been humming along for nearly five years now but it is starting to show its age.  In fact, the upgrade is probably at least six months overdue.  Poor thing can’t keep up with all those damned MS patches anymore!  Oh and it got blasted by the same lightning strike that fried the hard drive on my old DVR.  Her damage was limited to the built-in NIC.  I guess I’m off to a little Newegg shopping.

So…what to get?  I think the goal is to keep cost down and recycle some old parts like the CD/DVD ROM, HDD (IDE but works like a champ), and maybe adopt a slightly newer 8400GS gpu.  That leaves three major parts: cpu, motherboard, RAM.  I should also note that this build should last just as long if not longer than the old one and keep up with newer and heavier apps until then.

CPU

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Imagine clearing your house of stuff you don’t use anymore like a set of truck rims and tires or an old bicycle.  Not only will you be able to reclaim some space but you can get some money back too.  This won’t get you rich by any means but at least you can use the extra cash for something else like paying your credit card debt.

So why is it that more people aren’t using sites like eBay or Craigslist to sell their old junk.  Yes there’s a potential that you have to deal with getting scammed but if you follow some of the tips below, you can avoid it like I have.  Of course having said that I just managed to jinx myself. 

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I finally joined the Tivo revolution after resisting it for so many years. It has been 5 months since I bought my refurb TivoHD from Tivo.com and so far so good.  I had a ReplayTV 5040 prior to this and it recorded many, many shows over the years. It even survived a lightning strike. No, not directly but thanks to a ghetto CAT5 cable going to the neighbor’s house (don’t ask), the ReplayTV unit got a little extra juice. Aside from a messed up hard drive, the unit lived on to record a few more shows. I ended up selling it on eBay and to my surprise, I still got nearly $400 for it.

TivoHD seemed like a logical replacement choice. After all, it has gained high acceptance among DVR users. It also has the one feature I wanted and that is the ability to record HD shows. The only thing that bothered me was the subscription fee. I ended paying the lifetime fee of $400 but if I crunched the numbers right, TivoHD should pay for itself after 21 months of ownership. That includes the savings from dropping the monthly cable box fees as well as the cost of the 1TB hard drive upgrade.

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For my first official entry, I’ll start with one of my favorite gadgets of all time, the heart rate monitor.  To date, it has been the most beneficial.  It has transformed me from leading a relatively sedentary lifestyle to one where my workouts have been targeted to specific goals.  I don’t think I would have been able to train properly to even attempt at starting an Ironman event much less finish one.

The transformation started one day in early 2003 when a routine medical checkup revealed an elevated cholesterol level and high blood pressure.  Though not quite life-threatening, I was a little concerned.  I thought regular weekend mountain bike rides with friends were sufficient but it was not.

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