Want A Successful Economic Stimulus Package?

Then stop cutting checks for responsible adults, who are only going to do such, well, responsible things like catching up with bills for items that have already been purchased (no stimulus there), or buying essentials like gasoline and groceries. Trust me on this, oil companies plan their projects on extremely conservative estimates for the cost of oil, like between $45 to $55 a barrel. So, they are almost always making at least some profit, and usually raking in scandalous amounts of it. Stimulus is the LAST thing they need or deserve.

(THIS is what I'm listening to now.)

There is a better way. Just give all of the checks to computer geeks. I could not be more serious. Have you forgotten when one of those economic stimulus checks coincided with the release of the Xbox 360? The geeks, patriotic Americans all whether they realized it or not, didn't even bother with the middleman action of first depositing their checks in a bank. No, they took their checks directly to Best Buy, and walked out of the store with their new game consoles on the same day.

THAT, my friends, is economic stimulus.

And today, flushed with the knowledge that none other than Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson School of Business Economic Forecast, has said that the worst thing U.S. consumers can do this Christmas is to stop buying en masse, I have now done my bit for the moribund American economy. I sat down to my computer and laid out some serious green for new hardware.

Irresponsible of me? Phhtt. Hardly. I'm richer this year by roughly $125k, thanks to what my dear old mum left us when she died. The vast majority of it is safely and responsibly earning interest in Depression proof accounts.

And I didn't go overboard. For less than half of the price of a single, stupidly over-configured glam computer, like a Reactor Extreme (see yesterday's post), I've managed to fulfill my little family's hardware needs with casual gaming quality to hardcore gaming quality gear through new purchases and upgrades.

Here's what I did.

Goal: no frills laptop computer for Roy with a large screen, spacious keyboard and decent storage for use on his research trips.

Answer: Acer Aspire 5315-2940 Notebook. Intel Celeron M Processor 540 (1MB L2 cache, 1.86GHz, 533MHz FSB), 1GB DDR2 667 SDRAM, 80GB hard drive, Integrated CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive TFT Display: 15.4" WXGA (1280 x 800), Acer CrystalBrite Technology, Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100, 802.11b/g WLAN, 10/100 LAN, V.92 modem, Windows Vista Home Basic. Cost: $349.00. 

Acer makes truly dependable if slightly boring notebooks that have never given me a single technical problem. And the fact that you can get one with a full size keyboard and a 15.4" screen for the cost of a cramped little netbook is truly awesome.

And since Roy has been on the receiving end of some of the most wicked hack attacks I have ever encountered because his work ferreting out illegal toxic waste sites is always making him new and fun friendships (not!), this is a computer that can be easily replaced without kicking our insurance premiums through the roof.

Goal: Replacement for the last of my old servers, a Dual Opteron 244 with twin 1.79 GHz chips and a piddly Ati Radeon 9600 Pro video card. Sad to see this one go, as it was one of the two I ran as private servers for games like Battlefield 2. But Roy and Julian need a new desktop of their own to share that will be fast enough for casual gaming and big enough to store all of Julian's games and movies and all of Roy's files.

Answer: I'm seriously thinking about hosting a private server for City of Heroes and City of Villains (my in-game friends would get to play for free). But for now, we'll get a desktop that Roy and I will put together ourselves with the following components: ASUS P5N32-E SLI System motherboard. This is the same rock solid mobo that my current gaming rig is based on, only now it is quite inexpensive.

The SLI will allow an upgrade to a true hardcore gaming rig, should either Roy or Julian get really serious about their gaming. For now, it will hold a single NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT 1GB PCI-E graphics card.

The rest of the specs are as follows: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 4GB DDR-II PC2-6400 800MHz RAM, 750GB SATA-II Hard Drive 7200RPM, 20x DVD+/-RW Drive, Cooler Master CM 690 Mid Tower Chassis, MS Windows XP Pro. Cost: $1,200. Total cost: $1,549.

Goal: My last mobile computer was an awesome Alienware notebook. Top of the line in every respect, except battery life, of course. And it was massively damaged in one of those aforementioned hack attacks against Roy, which is the reason for two changes: An El Cheapo mobile box for Roy, and he does not get to even BREATHE near the next notebook I buy. Since, I'm a mommy now, LAN partiers are few and far between, unless I'm hosting them. And I was a game design student in Florida when I got the Alienware.

So, my goals now are much more modest. A better than casual gaming mobile rig that can play my favorite MMORPG games in high resolution and fast frame rates, but will come in at less than half of the exorbitant cost of my Alienware. And since it really won't be leaving my house much, it can have a ridiculously huge screen capable of playing at higher resolutions than my gaming desktop.

Answer: Acer Aspire Gemstone Blue 8930G-6448. Acer? ACER? Not Alienware? Voodoo? Not even a Dell or Toshiba?

Yes, well, I'm older and wiser now at 26, and I need to justify my splurges even more now as a mother. And just because Acer is best known for Khaki style business class notebooks does not mean it can't step out in an Oscars quality gown when it wants to. This one is ready for the red carpet.

Windows Vista^® Ultimate; Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9400 (6MB cache, 2.53GHz, 1066MHz FSB); 4GB (2/2) DDR3 1066 SDRAM; 320GB hard drive; integrated Super-Multi drive; 6-in-1 card reader; Acer® CineCrystal 18.4" WUXGA (1920 x 1080) TFT LCD; NVIDIA® GeForce® 9700M GT graphics; 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N WLAN, Bluetooth®, gigabit LAN, V.92 modem, webcam; fingerprint reader.

Yes, that's right, a fingerprint reader, so no little gooey eight year old boy fingers are going to be turning this box on, and Roy's fingers won't work either. Just mine. Muy ha ha ha ha! 

The GeForce 9700M GT is not nearly as good as the top of the line mobile graphics card from NVIDIA, which is the 9800 series, but my days of playing the most demanding pc games, which are first person shooters and not standard MMORPGS, are largely over.

And yet it will run many of the most demanding games in 1920 x 1080 resolution. How good is that? I play my MMORPGS on my gaming rig in 1680 x 1020.

Once Acer makes this computer big enough to hold a large mobile video card like the 9800 series, it will be able to compete against anything.

But here is the best part about the Acer Aspire Gemstone Blue: the price. New Egg was selling it for $1,599, which is frankly an awesome deal. Total cost of our household hardware upgrade: $3,158 or less than $1,100 per computer so far.

We're almost done. Finally, there is my desktop gaming rig. When I bought it and benchmarked it more than a year ago, it tested as fast as many of the dream machines featured in my favorite computer magazine, which is Maximum PC - Minimum BS. It's specs were as follows: ASUS P5N32-E SLI mobo, ENERMAX 720-watt quadcore and SLI-ready Infiniti power supply, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 running at 2.66 GHz each, with 1066MHz 8Mb L2 cache, Windows XP professional's 64-bit edition, dual MSI NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTXs with 768 MB DDR3 video RAM each, 4 gigs of DDR2 800 OCZ Technology Gold GX XTC RAM, plus peripherals, all housed in a sleek, glossy, yet understated basic black Soprano RS 101 mid-tower chassis.

I think the true test of any personal gaming rig is to come back to it 12 months or 13 months later and decide what kind of upgrades it needs to still be among the fastest computers of the friends and acquaintances you play with.

Granted, my priorities have changed a LOT since November, 2007. Mom was still alive then, and Julian was my little step brother. Now, Mom is dead and Julian is my adopted son, so superfast rigs are less important to me now. Still, I've reviewed how my rig plays and haven't found a single major component that's worth changing. One really good test came from a buddy of mine from City of Heroes, who played with me a little from the Hero Con event this year on one of the primo rigs that was set up for the event.

We moved at exactly the same pace, loaded transition screens at exactly the same rate. That told me a lot. So, all my gaming rig is getting is a good cleaning, a really big hig from me, and a new 1 terabyte storage drive from Seagate to replace the two 250 Gb maxtor drives that failed over the past several months.

And now, we're done. Three new computers and one upgrade, for just $3,300.