New Computer
The new computer arrived today. I’m pretty excited. The current computer isn’t bad hardware-wise, though it’s difficult to upgrade any more than it is. The big problem is that the software is a disaster. The new herd drive can’t seem to install Windows 2000, I’m not sure why, and our current install is flaky as hell. Diana often has to log into my account just to view web sites, which defeats the whole purpose of having accounts.
It was time to switch to Windows XP (Vista is still in beta, even if Microsoft is selling it) but it’s hard to get it at any reasonable price. My solution was to buy a Dell small business computer. I assembled the machine I wanted and balked at the price: $1300. So I went to newegg and price checked every extra. Eventually I even ended up downgrading to the cheapest processor and buying a new one (yep, Dell actually charges more for a processor upgrade than the processor itself costs).
Some of the purchased pieces were nicer than what Dell was offering (wireless keyboard/mouse combo, the 65W 4600+ which runs much cooler, 2.5GB instead of 2GB). The stripped down Dell machine was $525 and the add-ons were $450, for a total of $350 savings ($345 after I realized I needed to buy some thermal paste for the new CPU).
It took about an hour to install all the pieces and figure out a way around a bug in the Dell BIOS, but it works beautifully.