The Itch Strikes Again

While enduring the itch of a rare yet sudden allergy attack, a thought that I've successfully buried for several years now have once again risen to haunt me (and my wallet).

Circa 2002, I've managed to build a pretty decent setup using an Athlon XP-Mobile 2400+ Barton Core overclocked to around 2gHz (5 years running!) using the ever reliable Epox 8RDA3G. It's topped off with 1GB of Dual-Channel DDR memory, 512MB GeCube X1600 video card and a 80GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10. Performance was nothing short of superb for 5 years now and was more than enough to meet our daily needs of net surfing, watching videos, enjoying music, a bit of gaming, and occassional school/office work.

Recently though, the inescapable talons of far-reaching technological advances have started to scrape through our 5-year complacency. I'm feeling the need for more memory to handle multiple browsers channeling tons of data from a broadband service that's getting cheaper faster than you can say DSL. More and more videos are starting to be encoded in HD (High Definition). Games are more demanding of life-like frame rates. Upgrading from Windows XP to Vista requires better hardware to run useless eye-candy. Even my venture into photography has me scrambling for terrabytes of storage space and processing power boost for my post-processing.

Undeniable.
Inevitable.
Ang mahal!!!