Our desktop PC died yesterday, and as it’s the PC I use 100% of the time (Robyn has her wee laptop) I made it my duty to make it work…
But alas I failed as the motherboard and processor had let slip the mortal coil, so in between going to the Braves final game of 2006 we went to CompUSA and eventually Best Buy where we picked up an open box Compaq (I know, I know) and cannibalised the old Compaq to make Super Compaq™… For a little over $500 we now have a PC that prolly retails for over $1,000, and after the Vista incident of a few months ago, it now takes me less than a day (with sleep in between) to rid the PC of all the crap it comes preloaded with and install all the good stuff I need as well as running patches, hotfixes and updates along the way. So yeah, we’ve basically doubled the spec of the old machine for half the price Robyn paid for it a little over 2 years ago. I remember when computers were hellishly expensive, my first PC was a Pentium II 266Mhz, with 64mb of RAM and a 6GB hard drive, that cost me £1,000 give or take… The new Super Compaq™ is an Athlon 64 2.41Ghz, with 2GB of RAM and (adding all the hard drives together) around 650GB in hard drive space. You think it’ll run Photoshop?
Plus it came with Windows Media Center Edition preloaded (we all know my struggles with that before) and it works with my TV card, sweet…
Also, as I mentioned Vista, the new RC1 DVD plopped in our mailbox today, I think I’ll load it onto Robyn’s old laptop for testing purposes, she doesn’t use it as she has her aforementioned wee laptop.
Also, speaking of wee (kinda sorta), our local Target already has an empty isle dedicated to the upcoming Nintendo Wii, I’m interested to see how the nunchuck controllers work, more so in a shopping environment.