My Dream PC

Stumbled upon this promising site from Asus. http://www.wepc.com/dream Basically, they’re crowdsourcing for ideas on your dream PC. I put in my two cents and am hoping to see my dream come true in the near future.

I am enamoured with the idea of a netbook. Low power and battery consumption for when you’re mobile. Great when you’re mobile. Sucks when you’re not. As much as I love the idea of the netbook I can’t justify limiting myself with a low powered PC. I don’t game as often as I used to ... but I do. I don’t convert video all that often anymore ... but I do. I can’t bear the thought of buying a netbook and a high end notebook just for myself. How do I keep all my stuff in sync between them? Myself, my wife, 3 kids and every TV in the house needs a PC as well. Can’t afford two of them just for me.

Can’t even really justify buying a netbook for my kids. My four year old started playing Spore; he wants to do everything his older brother does. The older boy’s taste in games outgrew the idea of any machine without dedicated graphics processing by the age of six. The only people in the family who would make use of a netbook would be me (a lot of the time now. sigh, sad how things have become) and my two year old (for now). Even at two years old he can navigate to IE (trying to get him to recognize the Firefox logo but hey, he’s two, there’s still hope for him) and pick from ‘Favorites’. He’s content with Treehouse, PBS Kids flash based stuff and Youtube for now but I don’t know how long it will last.

Here’s my list of things I want in my dream machine. Comments? If our lists match please get to WEPC and get these features into a real machine.

- Like the netbook but need it to do more. Current EEE OK but I need it to dock to a station that provides access to beefier processing power, DVD/Blu Ray, keyboard & mouse, other cool stuff.

- Not enough to just dock to a station for using peripherals. The dream needs to be more than just a port replicator / peripheral hub. The netbook should be able make use of extra processing power, RAM, GPU, etc. when docked. The end result should be a no compromises made solution geeks wet dream machine.

- User customizable / upgradable station. I want to be able to walk into my local computer shack, buy whatever pieces I want and slap it in. When nVidia releases a new card and I get approval from the finance committee (wife) to buy it I want to buy it and slap it in. I don’t want to buy a new station (take a hint already Apple, and I guess every other notebook out in the wild). When Sony roles out the next gen Blu Ray (this is likely, they don’t seem that consumer friendly anymore) I want to pull out the old and slap in the new one.

- 200mm fans. I love the 200mm on the top of my Antec 900. Bigger fan, more air at slower speeds, less noise. Smaller fan, more air if spinning faster, more noise. Makes sense to me. The station should to have 200mm fans on top, rear and both sides. And they should light up too. Why not?

- Liquid cooling? Hey, if you’re going to dream, dream big. Maybe we’ll call this optional.

- Really, really, really, important one; if you’re going to make white ones that’s OK; just don’t make me pay extra for a black one. (Apple Fanboys can chime in on this one but even for a dieharderer, Jobs is the tech messiah, you got to admit that that was a really crappy thing for Apple to do).

- Give us HDMI. I have HDMI on my TV’s and I know where to buy others. If you want to give us Display Port that’s OK, just give us a choice. And if you really want us to use Display Port, can you at least offer us a monitor that uses it? Or at the very minimum, give us one free adaptor when you ship it to us?

That’s my dream machine so far. Fingers crossed that we see something cool in the near future.