Amusing Musings

A brief recap – The old laptop was showing its age, hence we decided to build a custom PC. I went over my process of parts selection in the last post. This post comes with both its highs and lows – the euphoria of build and a delivery nightmare. Read on... The parts arrived earlier than expected, to my delight! The only part left was the motherboard – the one that tied it all together. This is where the hellish customer experience began. The product shipped was the incorrect model – slightly inferior in quality to the MSI A-320 A-Pro MAX that I had ordered. Fine, I returned it and ordered it again, this time from a different seller on Amazon. That was a mistake. They shipped a used (possibly a returned, faulty unit). It had clear signs of use – thermal paste marks, fingerprints on the I/O shield and the SATA cable pouch was torn open. Fuming, I returned it again, this time leaving a 1-star review for the sellar with proof. As if to add salt to the wound, Amazon rejected the review. Th...

​The old laptop was starting to show its age, with the slow spinning drive and faulty display. Scouring the internet for deals on budget laptops, I was disappointed by the lack of options with 8gb ram and solid-state storage within budget. So it was clear – we decided upon a custom-built PC! This was it! Finally, with all the research I had done in custom pc hardware, I can now use it to select parts for a home PC. I was stoked, as I always wanted to get hands-on with it (3 years of JEE preparation, then the first year of college and so on). I first searched for the most important part- the CPU. Within the budget, I saw three options – the Pentium Gold G5400, Athlon 200GE ( really wanted the 300GE but wasn’t available in India at that time :-( ) and the Ryzen 3 2200g. The Ryzen 3, while being the fastest among all three, was a tad bit overpriced. The extra cost, I felt was better invested in good storage and ram. The Pentium and Athlon were pretty close in performance, edge ...