computer
Ah yes, a computer geek's ultimate weapon: the computer. As of Oct 28, 2008, I'm still using a ~$200 Dell Dimension. Trust me, not fun. With my usage patterns (Mozilla Firefox with 200+ tabs, mplayer, XChat, Pidgin, and so much more), this thing dies regularly. But soon, and by soon I mean within the end of this year, I will get my dream computer! Great power for an affordable price!
Update:
Just recently bought a Dell Studio XPS from Craigslist. Quad core Core i7, 6GB DDR3 RAM, and an ATI Radeon HD4850, all for ~$900. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Software
Obviously, since this is a gaming computer, I'm be running Windows XP Professional on this thing. However, I'll also dual boot Gentoo Linux for my development and everyday tasks. Incidentally, you should check out my Vista rant.
Comments
New hardware is nice...
The ATI card in here is nice, but I feel that ATI can do a lot better in its Linux support. Around the summer of 2009, ATI released a bunch of specs to the open source community and basically told them to go make drivers. Their current proprietary drivers, known as fglrx, have major issues with the latest versions of the Linux kernels. The free drivers, radeon and radeonhd, have some growing pains with supporting the newer cards.
Dell seriously needs to learn how to get their worksmanship quality up. Back when I bought my computer, it was basically the best bang for the buck money could buy. Unfortunately, my joy was ruined when I realized that the fan (CPU? PSU? Case?) was extremely loud. A BIOS update did help a bit, but it's still downright atrocious. Couldn't they have bothered with spending maybe a dollar or so more to get a nicer fan?