My ex-girlfriend’s breakup was only an hour old when I decided I’d hit up MicroCenter and build myself a monster desktop to drown my sorrows. Who says you can’t use hardware to get over a break-up? Okay, right — that sounds gross. Nevermind. So, here’s what I picked out:

• (1) Thermaltake ATX Case Armor Silver Aluminum
• (1) Seasonic 600W ATX Power Supply
• (1) Intel D975XBX ATX Montherboard
• (1) Intel Core 2 Duo E6300
• (1) Arctic Freezer7 Pro CPU Fan
• (1) Corsair 1 GB US 667MHZ DD Memory
• (2) Western Digital 10K RPM 74GB Serial ATA Drives
• (2) Western Digital 400GB Serial ATA Drives
• (1) EVGA 7600GT 256MB PCIE Video Card with dual DVI outputs
• (1) Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2
• (2) 6′ DVI cables
• (2) Samsung SyncMaster 931B 19” TFT-LCD Monitors

Nice? I also gutted an HP Pavillion that I literally found on the streets of Philadelphia last year. The CD-R drive and floppy made the final cut. Believe it or not, the fools that left that machine for the garbage man had left their harddrive intact. I briefly attempted to use the drive for my new machine. It would only boot up in Windows ME safe mode. I read the boring emails that were still in the Internet Explorer cache. I played with the idea of contacting the original owners and taunting them in some unorthodox way. Then I remembered I was 37 years old and had to pay a mortgage. So, whatever. It’s the thought that counts.

I do feel that the motherboard I purchased is defective in that two of the mounting screws cause the power to short out. I’ve got the offending areas covered in white electrical tape just to be safe. I considered taking the mother board back, but it would mean removing it for the fifth time. It took me that many extractions to figure out the problem. Meh, whatever. The machine is called MONSTERBOX, but I briefly considered naming it DANGERBOX.

I’m off to see HOLLYWOODLAND at the Lagoon Cinema down the street in 30 minutes. I’ll post a follow-up on how freaking fast two Western Digital 10,000 RPM S-ATA harddrives in a RAID-0 configuration are. The machine boots in, like, 5 seconds. Yay. Okay, movie time.