New Computer

Our current home computer is very old by computer standards. It is somewhere around 8 years old, and is starting so show its age. I have tried nursing it along over the years, I have had to add disk space to it twice, and added memory to it once or twice in its day.

In the last week or two, it has started to have little hard drive failures. It will hang on Tara while she is trying to get something done on the computer, and she will be unable to get it to recognize the disk after a reboot. I have got it running again so far, but the signs of impending death are clearly there.

I looked at a couple of different machines from Dell, and looked at some HP machines. This past week, Dell was running some deals, I ended up getting a nice computer for the amount of one of the machines I had spec'ed out, but the one we got had many more upgrades in it.

The computer I got? A Dell Inspiron 530, 4GB of memory, 20inch flat panel monitor with integrated speaker, 320GB hard drive, DVD+/-RW drive, and a 4 year accidental care warranty. Not the best computer money can buy, but for what we will use it for here at home, not a bad deal at all.

They also gave me 2 business day shipping, my new machine was in Memphis this morning, and is only 40 miles away right now. It should arrive sometime tomorrow.

The first thing I will do? I will install Windows XP over the top of the Vista installation Dell provides. (Unless someone can give me a compelling reason not to in the next 21 hours...) I have the home directory for the old machine, including all music, photos, etc on an external hard drive for our existing machine, so it should be fairly easy to move everything over. It will be really nice to have the extra space on the desk by getting rid of the CRT monitor.

The second thing I will do? I will probably install name extraction software for Tara. The third thing? Wish I could find the Zoo Tycoon 2 disk (the one that I swear I loaned to Missy...) so I can install the game and both expasion packs I have so we can play the game for the girls on that machine. There are some silly little games the girls like to play that we can't install, we don't have the installation files. This might not be such a bad thing.

I hope we don't ever have to use the Accidental Care coverage, but you never know, especially around here, that is why I got it. I would save the thing for Christmas, and just wrap it up, but that seems a little silly since the machine on the desk right now is so slow and is having so many problems...