Finally pulled the trigger on a new machine.

[kandrathe]

Niice. I would consider a more quality power supply, and a better video card later on, but everything over there looks sweet. I hope you got a great price for it.

It was under $1k, with the MS Office upgrade. It looked like a good base to build upon, and upgrading later was the plan for now. When I upgrade the GPU, I'll get a bigger power supply.

I also had to sink $300 into my old machine to get a new 1TB hard drive and Windows 7. It is too slow for modern high end GPU games, but its very good, for the older stuff.

Last year I had picked up 2 old 2005/6 era desktop machines from work for $75 each, and then sank $100 each upgrading them. We've limped by on them for the last 6 months, and my intention was that they would not be gaming machines, but they've feebly strayed into that territory.

I also bought an inexpensive 8 port switch($35) and a refurbished Cisco e2000($40), then I subnet'd my house. I now have 3 (of 4) networks in the 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.192 range; 1) for servers(1-63), & 2 routers, 2) wired desktops (129-191), 3) wireless devices (193-255). I still need to run a hard line to the master bedroom, but I've dropped the wire into the basement for now.

It's hard to keep up when your kids get to gaming age. My eldest has organized about 20 boys from his school into a gamer guild. Now I just need to configure the team speak server so they can get off the darn phone.