Death of an Alien

My Alienware Area 51 game system finally bit the dust. It’s been acting flaky for the past week or so, probably because it gets very hot inside my apartment, and leaving the A/C running 24/7 amounts to a $90 electric bill. This morning I tried to check mail, it started to boot, gave me some sort of KMODE error, then quit. I don’t mean rebooted, I mean SHUT DOWN. It will not come up at all now. If I were to replace the motherboard, that would mean new memory, new processor (most likely, as I don’t know what exactly it is that croaked,) new memory, and possibly a new video card (all the current boards are PCI-E, the only one I saw that does AGP and PCI-E was marked “RUN SCREAMING” by several reviewers.) From what little I have done as far as researching prices, I am looking at about $1200 for parts. That doesn’t include the 400G hard disk I was going to put in before my system died.

I could go with a laptop for the next two years. After all, I need it for school, and it would really be nice if I could continue to play World of Warcraft on it. Dell has some nice XPS laptops for games, and my wife gets a discount on them. On the other hand, I could do the unthinkable and go with a MacBook… The new MacBook line runs on Intel Core Duo chips, which is pretty much what I’d be getting anyway if I were to build myself a new system. Also, there’s a way to dual-boot Windows XP Pro and Mac OS X, so I could do my schoolwork and play WoW on Mac OS X, and still have XP in case I run into something that isn’t compatible with OS X. Sure the price is approaching $3k, but I’d be getting two laptops for that price.

Sadly, I don’t have $3k lying around, any more than I have $1200 sitting there doing nothing. So I’m sorta stuck. I can use the school computers for now, and I have a Tablet PC back in NH that I can use once I get down there for Labor Day. I’d rather have something a bit more robust for my internship though. (and playing WoW on it would be nice too…)