I have used a laptop as my main machine for a couple years now. I guess calling it a laptop would be a bit of a misnomer — it is an Alienware m9750, a relative powerhouse for its time, weighing in at 10 lbs and making my car think I’m a bad driver who lets her front seat passengers ride without a seatbelt if I were to put it beside me in the car. It has served me well, but the time has come to move on.

I opted to return to the desktop this time, in part for financial reasons and in part because I would’ve much preferred to just do a few spot upgrades on my laptop… which unfortunately wasn’t much of an option. I haven’t paid attention to hardware in a while, so I enlisted the help of a friend in sourcing out good parts to put together. Here’s what we ended up with:

ASRock H55M Pro Micro ATX motherboard
Intel Core i3-530 2.93Ghz Dual Core CPU
4GB DDR3 1333 RAM
Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATA HDD (7200 RPM, 32MB Cache)
MSI N250GTS Twin Frozr 1GB video card

With a couple other bits (such as power supply and a DVD burner, all this lives inside an In Win Griffin case and is hooked up to my existing monitor — a 24″ Samsung SyncMaster 2443BW.

For completeness’ sake, my keyboard and mouse are both Logitechs — a Wave and an MX400, respectively.

It is by no means an ultimate machine, but for just over $800 after taxes and shipping, it’s not too shabby at all.

Here’s a comparison of the Windows Experience Index scores. Old laptop:

New desktop:

I look forward to upgrading the hard drive at some point (maybe with some solid state goodness) to bump that score up a point.