It’s more than eighteen months since my last post in this series and I’ve had a busy time. Thankfully, the pandemic is just a bad memory and life has returned to normal, although much has changed, some of it for the better.
New PC builds
One of my longstanding customers, an elderly Argentine Air Force pilot, has been using an HP all-in-one (AIO) PC for some years and I was about to change out the spinner for an SSD because the machine had become nauseatingly sluggish. Take the dog for a walk around the block while waiting for Windows to load, kind of sluggish. Anyway, we kicked around the idea of a new PC, and much to my delight, he went for the idea. We chose a Ryzen 5600G, 16GB of RAM, a 500GB NVMe, a decent mid-range Asus motherboard, and a nice black case with a glass panel. He later bought a cool 24″ monitor, we backed everything up from the AIO and he hasn’t looked back since. Clearly, the speed difference is night and day and I managed to sell his AIO to another customer for spare parts.
A few weeks later he asked me to build an identical PC for his grandson, this time with a GPU for video rendering and I was only too happy to oblige because building PCs is what I most enjoy about this business. Then, shortly afterward, I was asked to build yet another new PC for a customer’s son, this time for gaming. They bought all the components after consulting with me, based around an Intel CPU and an Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU and I had a lot of fun putting it together, not to mention testing some game demos with the RTX graphics card.
One Gaming PC Is Enough
Following my move into the new den, it didn’t make sense to keep two gaming PCs, so I dismantled the older one, a Ryzen 2600X, an Asus ROG Strix RX580 GPU with 32GB of RAM, and sold the full tower NZXT case. But instead of selling the components, I rebuilt it in a new case which we now use connected to the TV in our newly refurbished living room, instead of having to use the crappy smart TV apps. The RX 580 GPU I have kept just in case my main GPU, an RX 5700 XT goes belly up.
Other Stuff
I haven’t been visited by any outrageous customers recently, but I did manage to get my book translated into Spanish. I also had a new book cover designed and launched at the Buenos Aires book fair. It was a long process but very much worth it in the end, especially since the cover is so controversial. The Union Flag isn’t the most popular flag in these parts, following the Falklands War.
I also refurbished an ancient HP desktop PC which I later sold on behalf of a customer for a small commission. It was an enjoyable exercise and I was tempted to keep the machine as a retro, but for some unfathomable reason, HP had disabled the AGP slot. I don’t remember the exact details, but it was a real head-scratcher.
Since November 2021, which is when most of the aforementioned took place, Argentina has descended into financial chaos – read, situation normal – with over 100% annual inflation, Soviet-style currency restrictions, and other mind-boggling nonsense, so I’ll leave this here while I ruminate over Day 18 if you don’t mind.
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Marc,
I am interested in buying your book in English here in the USA. Do you have a link or suggestions where I might buy it from?
Hello Robert
Here’s a link for Amazon and you should be able to buy it in paperback or eBook.
Enjoy!
https://amzn.eu/d/hBobA4J
Thanks Marc,
I had originally looked up your name in the Amazon USA search and came up with nothing. So I thought I would write you, thanks for the link.
The Covid pandemic was one of the biggest worldwide government cons ever. So many economies damaged and lives disrupted over little more than a flu unless you were old and/or immuno-compromised. But don’t get me started.
How is the effects of inflation going in Argentina Marc ? I was surprised to hear that people can afford to buy new PC parts. Or is it not as bad there as we’ve been led to believe ? Do you buy locally or from overseas and do you need USD ?
Hello Reg
Don’t get me started on the pandemic either. It was a great excuse for legitimising a police state.
As for inflation, it means our money is worth less every week, so it’s a ‘buy now before it goes up’ situation.
Due to a negative balance of USD in the central bank, imports are restricted which affects tech hardware price wise. We still buy locally in pesos because buying overseas puts you into Soviet style bureaucracy.
Is it as bad here as you’ve been led to believe? It’s worse. They just keep printing money which costs more to print than it’s end value.
Still, it’s an election year, so expect more BS, as it were.