My Trusted Friend...

3X says "You all must be wondering what is that box? If you take a closer look, you will see that is actually a PC.... yes thats my trusted personal computer... and its a full functioning PC. Its a Pentium 3 700mhz with 512mb ram, 40gb hard disk, with Geforce2MX card, and ethernet and firewire card. All the components are encased inside that box. The openings for the power supply and other connectors are cut using a pen-knife. Click here for a bigger picture.

All the family, wedding, vacation videos, images and blog programmings I have ever produced, are all designed and created with this pc. Contrary to some beliefs, I do not own a pentium 4 with a gigazillion megahertz processor. While I have people asking me about what latest processor or PC components to use, I always wonder what they intend to use with it. My advice has always been, unless you intend to play intensive 3D games (such as Quake 4 or Doom 3) there's absolutely no need to spend on expensive upgrades. But do they listen.... of course no.

I have a friend who is of middle income and soul-bread winner, who ask me to upgrade his PC and he wants the fastest and most powerfull. He has an old pc, and said its useless. He followed me to Sim Lim, and together we bought the components that I recommended to him. At the end of the day, after spending over thousand of dollars to upgrade his PC, I assembled it for him, and set it up at his house. His sons who are Primary 3 and 5 were excited with the new PC. After connecting it to the Internet, I showed him this blog. He and his sons, immediately said they want to make something like this, and said now they can finally do it, because now they have a powerfull PC. I told them their old pentium 3 pc (733mhz) is faster than my pc (700mhz).... they looked at me.... with mouths open... My friend asks am I joking? I said its true, I do not need a gigazillion PC, all that I want to do, I can do with my P3, and it does what I want. Then he ask me about the video editing work or creating images, reports or presentations, I told him all done using my trusted P3.

My friend clearly doesn't know what he wants, he only assumes faster/expensive/bigger means better. In some sense it holds true for some things, but if you ask me... size does not matter... its what you know what to do, with what you have.