My Shuttle SFF PC
My current PC
It is possible to buy a pre made system today that is as good and as cheap as any home assembled PC. But there are always factors that can not be edited when dealing with completed systems. My current PC is in a way my view of the perfect home computer that suits all my needs. From working with web design to surfing the web as I run an internet conference with five partners it fits my needs.
My PC
My current PC is based on a small Shuttle barebones case. Shuttle revolutionized the hardware industry when they introduced the smaller barebones series around 2001/2002. One of the big issues of the future is the power consumption of computers. When I configured my system I wasn’t aware of exactly how much power a full system uses. I was a bit surprised to see my Shuttle using up to 110 watt in CPU and GPU intensive games. Since I do not play games a lot I was happy that my Shuttle only used 60 to 70 watt when I worked in office applications. Basically the part in my system using most wattage is the processor, a Pentium 4 clocked at 2.4 GHz. My graphics card, an ATI Radeon 9600- does surprisingly not use more than 5 to 15 Watts depending on the application. How much power a computer uses is a frequently misunderstood conception a lot of times. Many thinks a 500 watt power supply means the computer is using 500 watt but that is simply not true since the watt specs on the power supply only indicates how much the power supply is capable of (which often is not the truth, only what the factory making the power supply wants you to believe).
Keyboard, mouse and monitor
Overlooked a lot but important none the less a good keyboard is essential when you write a lot. I had been using the famous IBM model M keyboard for some years mainly because I heard so many good comments about them. I have since then sold all my model M keyboards because they where too noisy, clumsy and weighted too much (they have a thick and very heavy steel sheet inside them). Finding a good keyboard when you don’t want windows keys is hard. I have been looking for one for a long time.
I am running a 23 inch widescreen TFT monitor running in 1920×1200. A large widescreen monitor is a great partner when working with the web.
Operating system
I have run a lot of operating systems during the years, from Windows 3.11, MS-Dos, NetBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, to Windows XP. Currently Windows XP Pro is my system of choice. Mostly because it supports all important applications I need to run and is a relatively care free operating system if some care is taken setting up the system with firewall and a virus package and when opening up unknown files.