Big Purchase- $11.91!

I knew eventually my not-buying-new streak would end, and so it did on Monday. Just 2 days shy of 3 months without buying anything new. That I couldn't eat, that is.  Sweet.

But this purchase was long overdue, and I was very happy with what turned out. Without further ado, my purchase(s):

Thermal paste and a SATA cable

If you recall back to my post about the trifecta of sustainability, you'll remember that my good friend O gave me a bunch of his old computer components.  Well, over Christmas he also bought me Windows 7 and gave me his old 200 GB SATA hard drive and another better CPU.  When I had installed the first round of his components, there was quite a maneuvering to get my IDEE hard drive, DVD drive, and CD drive to fit on the one IDEE cable.  I had to leave the DVD drive out because it simply didn't fit.  At the time I was thinking of buying a SATA hard drive to alleviate the problem, but lo and behold, another month of flexibility and a got one for free!  This is the first time I've had a hard drive over 80 GB!

Of course, by that month, I had already packed away my SATA cable with my old motherboard and left it in my parent's house, which has since been torn down.  So checked craigslist/freecycle and I asked all my nerdy friends if they had extra SATA cables or extra thermal paste lying around (and this is what took me a month).  But they didn't (for shame!) which meant...buying new.

However, I knew I didn't want to just get it online, due to the environmental impact of shipping.  During this time of pleading with nerds for parts, one informed me of a small shop right in SOMA.  So off I went to Central Computers, which is just about as local as you can get for computers.  By which I mean, the company seems based in China.  Not only were the parts reasonably priced (student discount) but they had limited packaging too (everything I took out of the store is pictured).  

At home the next day, I tore apart my computer, and by tore I mean I gingerly laid it down on it's side (on newspaper, so I wouldn't have to deal with carpet's static electricity) and opened it up.  I unlatched my heat sink, unlatched the old [old] CPU, and put in the old [new] one, put a dime size amount of THERMAL PASTE (such a cool thing to buy), and then reattached the heat sink.  Then I installed the hard drive, hooked up the DVD drive (instead of the CD drive that had fit on the IDEE cable) so I could install Windows 7 DVD.  Closed it back up and installed Windows 7, which only required a little troubleshooting with O since it wouldn't recognize the old [new] hard drive so I thought I might have broken it in transit.  But I didn't, and with a little more troubleshooting with O (a genius) over the HD audio, I FINALLY had a AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+, 200GB SATA harddrive, 2GB RAM desktop.  All for the low cost of $11.91.  Told you it was a big purchase!

Awesome.