cmurray.org

I dearly wanted my next PC to be a Mac. I have serious Mac-envy. My Windows PC, in fact, is tricked out to appear like a Mac, as is my Ubuntu desktop. But alas, the cost of admission still is too steep. (Although it amazes me, the twists of logic one can produce to convince oneself–and perhaps one’s spouse–that a purchase is truly required and justifiable.)

Now that school for me is close to complete, I intend to use my time otherwise spent studying and writing papers to delve back into making music. My mission is to gather some of my old equipment now stored in a closet (mixing board and some outboard effects) and combine them with a PC-based recording system. I looked at a lot of stand-alone recording systems, but the prices are high and I already own really great recording software. This also seems to be the way studios are going, software based systems on very high-end computing platforms.

So, I began looking around at PCs that were up to the task. I thought first of building my own PC. I’d heard that you can buy all the components and a case and build a new PC for significantly less than a major brand. While that is true, the system I configured and priced would still have cost near a thousand dollars.

I spoke with my brother Keith, who has made many purchases from eBay. I looked around on eBay and found some really kicking systems for astonishingly good prices (I kept thinking of the Crazy Eddie commercials of my youth: ‘Noooobody Beats Crazy Eddie!’). I wrote to several of the vendors to ask how they could sell these things so cheap and the answer, predictably, was that they make so many of them that they get their parts at discount rates. Another reason for the low cost is because most of them come with no OS installed, like Windows or Mac OSX. (I have a Windows XP Pro disk so this is not an issue).

So I took the plunge and ordered a custom system with the following specs, all for around $400 (I already have the monitor, mouse, and keyboard):

I dearly wanted my next PC to be a Mac. I have serious Mac-envy. My Windows PC, in fact, is tricked out to appear like a Mac, as is my Ubuntu desktop. But alas, the cost of admission still is too steep. (Although it amazes me, the twists of logic one can produce to convince oneself–and perhaps one’s spouse–that a purchase is truly required and justifiable.)