Thursday, January 08, 2009

The Plan..

Over the past few months I've been looking for a computer perferibly a laptop but I wasn't ruling out a desktop and a netbook. So for awhile I was stuck on a Macbook which is an amazing laptop but, I started thinking how my life pretty much revolves around Windows. With my Xbox 360, Ps3, Zune, etc.... it wouldn't of made much sense to switch to a Mac as in it wouldn't of been cost feasible since I would be in Windows probably just as much if not more than OSX. So then I switched to a Dell XPS One which is the equivilant to a Macbook Pro plus it had a TV tuner among other things that I liked a lot and it came with a Dell Mini 9 for $100. Then they stopped the deal with the Mini 9 and it was kind of a no deal. Then HP/Voodoo droped a bombshell, a desktop that is sleek, sexy, powerful, and wouldn't cost as much as a DaeWoo. As you may know I'm talking about the HP Firebird 003 with Voodoo DNA. Costing only $2100 for the top configuration sans monitor :-(  but still a good deal non the less and I wouldn't need a small power plant in my basement to run it. I think this is the first time I actually could tell where a company was coming from on one of there products, Rahul Sood is right gaming PCs have gone crazy, I mean having four graphics cards and hell even two processors is crazy especially when you get into the killowatt range. With the Black Bird and the Voodoo Omen going missing it shows Voodoo/HP is going into a different direction. Thus the sexy Firebird was born. Since the Engadget leak that showed off the Firebird I really couldn't stop thinking of it, it was exactly what I wanted. The Sexyness of a Mac (even sexier) with the convienance of Windows.  I really felt kind of bad when engadget spoiled it since this would of been one hell of a nice CES suprise! Though enough was concealed to keep me eager till CES to find out more. So back to the plan. I'm going to get a Firebird 003, not just because I like the machine its self but I like Voodoo's community, I find it amazing that Rahul Sood is out browsing blogs answering questions on their products when he really could be saying "hey go fuck yourslef" or not say anything at all. Anyway the monitor I'm going to get is a Acer P244wbii. It's one of Acer's top monitors, it's a 24" 16:9 HDCP display which will play nicely with the Blu-Ray drive packed into the Firebird. Oh and of course at 1080p resolution. I think its a good choice it has a 2ms response time which is good for gaming and has two HDMI inputs and includes one HDMI cable for simple hook up to the Firebird. The monitor is just a tad over $300 which is around what I want to spend. Next up is the speakers 
and I wanted some that would take advantage of the 
intergrated Sound Blaster X-Fi card but the few I want are out of the price range I want to spend on speakers at the moment. Not that Im settling with these since they are good speakers they just 
weren't my first choice. Since Creative makes the Sound Blaster card I thought it would be a good idea to check with them first and since I don't want 5.1 speakers at the moment, the Creative 
GigaWorks T40s  seem like a very good option. I like that you can control the bass and trebble right from the speakers its self. Since my surround sound I have likes to be extra bassy, I like to have control over it. I think thats it that goes with the Firebird. All of this is right around $2500 but even with all of this it doesnt solve the problem of not having a laptop. So with that I'm going to keep it in the HP family and get the Mini 1000 Mi series 
which is one of the best netbooks out right now. It runs a HP made shell over Linux which I can live with till Windows 7 comes out. I'm going to get it fully loaded 2GB of RAM, 10" screen, but I'm going with the 16GB SSD drive since there are no moving parts and I will upgrade it later on if it becomes a issue. So there it is, the plan for the perfect combo, a powerful desktop a great laptop all under $3,000.

PS.. either spell check isn't working on two browsers or I spelled everything right so yay for me.

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