I was in sleep, in nirvana, suddenly my cell phone started playing "In Da Club", I got up, tried to take the call. But I mistakenly rejected it in half-sleep. It rang, again started playing "In Da Club", now I was awake, picked up the call, said "Heellooo", in a lousy voice, on the other side was one of my cousin, she wanted to zero-in on a PC configuration and to seek my expert opinion ;)

I put forth some rapid-fire questions. Q) Why do ya wana upgrade? Q) Whts ya budget? Q) Whts gona happen to old Mojo? (yeah, she calls the old PC as Mojo)

I took the opportunity and asked her some irrelevant questions too ;)

We fixed up a meet and headed towards Lamington Road (Mumbai's official gray market).

We entered a small shop, I said to the salesman "We want to buy a PC.", I acted as if I didn't know anything about a PC configuration, he asked "Whats your budget?", I said "Medium", he suggested to go for an AMD, and started scribbling on a piece of paper. He handled me that piece of paper, it contained a list of items along with prices. I scanned through it, It contained AMD Athlon 3000+, MSI Motherboard, 256 MB Ram, 15' Samsung Monitor, Seagate 120 GB HDD, Sony DVD-RW, Microsoft Keyboard + Mouse, 400W SMPS + Cabinet, I asked him for a calculator, it summed-up little more than Rs. 25000 ($550). I was not satisfied with the configuration, I asked him to give me a configuration for P4, he said it would cost little more. I was looking for a mid-range PC and not for starters. My cousin did not speak a word, I was surprised, cause she's a chatterbox. We moved on.

We entered next shop, For some reason, the salesman was insistent on selling me an age old Sempron processor on an HIS board, "No, thanks", I told him as we pushed off. My cousin was getting little irritated to move from one shop to another, it was testing her patience.

The next shop we entered was a bit crowded, but the salesman seemed to be good on tech, he took no time to handle me a pre-printed piece of paper which contained a list of items along with prices. It had a Intel Pentium 4 Dual-Core PC configuration, now I put on my "techie hat" and fired few questions. I knew that I had to make up my own configuration, I asked "What about clock speeds?", he said "It starts from 2400+ and goes up to 3600+". "OK, What will it cost me?", he replied, "9k for the processor" and "6k for motherboard".

I said "Show me something hard-core", he was going through some boxes and popped one in front of me. He said "This is the latest, Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo". My Cousin said "Whatever just pick it up, I am tired". hmm.. "Whats the clock speed?", I asked. He said, "from 1.8Ghz and 2.4Ghz". I asked "What about the motherboard?", he said "I have Asus and Intel motherboards", he insisted to go for Asus, made me go through all the bells and whistle attached with the board. I said, "Tell me about Intel one", he said "Its a 946 chipset, onboard graphics, 6 channel audio, LAN" "What about the memory, does it support DDR2?", he replied "Yes". I asked for the cost, he said "15k for processor and motherboard combined". It sounded a good deal. My cousin was completely confused about what we were talking. It seemed to her as we were talking in some secret code language.

I made up my mind and decided to go with 1.8Ghz Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo and Intel D946GZIS motherboard along with two 512 MB DDR2 memory chips. Though he was offering me a 3.6Ghz Intel Dual core and the motherboard with same price as the Core 2 Duo, I decided to go for 1.8Ghz Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo, because the performance of Core 2 Duo is far much better than the Dual core. I did a comparison of both the processors. Clock speeds alone don't indicate performance.

So my final configuration looked somewhat like this.

1.8Ghz Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo Intel® Desktop Board D946GZIS Segate 250GB HDD 2x512MB DDR2 RAM 17' Samsung Monitor Lite-on DVD-RW 2.1 Creative Speakers Microsoft Keyboard + Optical Mouse Cabinet with 450W SMPS.

Which summed-up little more than Rs. 35000 ($780)

My cousin was very tired at the end of all this, but seemed happy. We had coffee at one of the shabby restaurant and said good-bye to Lamington road.

Cheers!

Labels: Agent 121282, Computer, Configuration, Hardware

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