Well, it's been a while since Sprocket was treated to anything new but she lucked out this week.
One side effect of our faltering economy is many failing businesses.
A friend of mine is in the computer recycling biz and has been gobbling up all the computer stuff from closing offices.
Last week he bid on a pallet of goods and for $400- FOUR HUNDRED DAMN BUCKS!- he got 10 Dell workstations, 10 20" IBM LCD monitors, a rackmount network setup (mostly Cisco) and 10 printer/scanners.
In exchange for helping cart away the booty, I got a monitor.
Not as stylish as regular consumer unit, the IBM has a thicker bezel and more pedestrian appearance but has a tilt/swivel/height adjustable base and is built like a brick shithouse.
Not a big step up from my old 19" but the main advantage is the resolution- the IBM runs 1600 x 1200 natively while the 19" (which was basically just a stretched 17" unit) only ran 1280 x 1024. It also has DVI connectors- the old unit was d-sub.
Plus, it's standard format...I'm not sold on "widescreen" models because they stretch text and look funny to me.
Not to mention, it was free!
Yesterday I picked up a LaCie 1TB external drive at Microcenter.
On sale for only $129.
It's actually quite stylish and silent in operation.
Internet rumor has it that they are either Samsung or Seagate SATA drives inside- I haven't opened it up to confirm (although you can bet I will soon!).
I just looked at the drive with Everest. It shows up as a Seagate TB SATA drive with 32MB cache. So basically, when you buy the LaCie you get a nice drive in a $10 enclosure...all in all, a very good deal I think.
I consolidated all my video- 936GB- onto it yesterday.
Because of the USB interface- and possibly because of Vista's slow file transfer performance- this took almost 9 hours.
Now I want another one...
Finally, this Wednesday I'll be getting a 64GB SSD from my buddy Eric who still works at the shop where I was employed.
He upgraded a customer laptop to a larger drive and they just gave him the 64GB. He can't really use it and since he owes me a few favors, he's giving it to me.
This will lead to a total reconfiguration of Sprocket.
Haven't really finalized what I want to do...a lot will depend on the case I choose to use.
I'll post pics when I get her done...just thought I'd share my good fortune right now.
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