I finally upgraded my ancient and somewhat flaky CTX monitor. Its replacement is an Acer AL1916, 19″ LCD, which was a steal for $189 — $157 after tax and rebate. (If you haven’t been to slickdeals.net, go now.)

A friend at work just bought an EVGA nVidia 6200 VGA+DVI video card to run two analog monitors. Unfortunately his PC doesn’t have an AGP slot (a must-have if you intend to use an AGP video card), so he went back and bought a PCI-Express video card. Unfortunately his PC doesn’t have a PCI-Express AGP slot either, so he went back and bought a PCI card. It fit, and he’s all happy now, but he has to ship two cards back and pay for restocking. What to do?

I bought his AGP card, hooked it all up last night and the difference is spectacular. I now have the best computer video and monitor I’ve ever had, all for less than $200, and I have to say to anyone who has not done so: Get an LCD now. Get DVI, too–it’s well worth the price difference, and will give you a good excuse to upgrade your old video card. You’ll have less eyestrain, fewer headaches, and that great “new computer” feeling without all the expense.

Plus, if you want a PCI-Express card, I know where you can get one cheap.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 1:13 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.