I need a new computer; that much is clear. My current ABS Bravado “Erebus” has worked phenomenally since I got it in November of 2001. I paid about $1150 for it then (but that money also bought a Logitech Elite Desktop and a set of Creative 5.1 speakers), which makes about $1247 in 2005 money. For that price, I got a computer that was fairly top-of-the-line for its day… Athlon XP 2000+, half a gig of RAM, 80GB/8MB hard drive, a GeForce4 Ti4400, and a Creative Audigy 1. It could play anything, run anything, do anything I threw at it… and in a shiny blue metallic case with a side window, it looked tons better than my family’s older ABS beige box. Being the first computer I bought for myself, it also carried with it a certain panache as “my own computer”. There’s no way I could buy a similar computer now for $1250 :-/
Over the years, I’ve thrown a few extra components in it… a second hard drive, an Audigy2 ZS Platinum, and a little more RAM. (Oh, and some glowing blue fans and lights 
) However, it’s growing increasingly bottlenecked, both by the aging processor and video card, and simply in general by the outdated architecture.
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