PCs only last so long. The laptop and my desktop had made it four or five years I think, at least, so that’s not too bad.

Our laptop was becoming painfully slow. As in, you’d type a URL and a few seconds later you’d see w…w…w… begin to appear (just as I typed this on my work pc the same thing began happening! guess that needs to be upgraded as well!). Ian switched us to Ubuntu linux, which was great, except the laptop was dying in many other ways. The screen’s casing had become cracked and was falling off with the screen likely to follow, and one hinge had completely torn apart so it didn’t open or close properly. It was well and truly jacked by that point so Ian found a really good deal on a Dell laptop. Unfortunately all Windows boxes have Vista on them now (there’s nothing about it that compels me to upgrade), so we’ll see how we like that. Ian can always switch it back to Linux if it’s the suX0r. (Yes, I’m a poser. I throw out 133tspeak but have my hubby switch operating systems on our computers!)

My desktop has been dying as well (they were both Compaqs btw..don’t ever buy those unless you absolutely have to!). The fan was dying, and the big problem was when it had to reboot, it would only switch from BIOS startup to OS/hard disk about 10% of the time. I’m guessing it needed a new BIOS chip, and since the system is so old that probably means a new motherboard. The form factors change all the time so that probably meant new RAM, CPU, chassis, fan and power supply (fan definitely needed changing anyways and it needed more RAM).  So, I decided I might as well get a new system. I wanted something cheap but reliable and fast (yeah, I know). Luckily I found a great deal at CompUSA for an HP a1774bX2.3Gls#23A or something (seriously, who names these things?). It’s got the AMD dual cores on it, which seem to be much cheaper than the Intel-based systems (go AMD!) running at 2.6 Ghz I believe (4400+ is the model I think), 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM, 320 GB HD (!!!!), and a DL DVD/CD R/RW combo drive, all for $500. Not bad I though. And it’s HP which I’ve heard is pretty reliable (I still can’t figure out why HP makes nice HP PCs and crummy Compaq PCs, guess they haven’t integrated those assembly lines yet).

It also came with Vista Business, one of the higher grade 31 flavors of Vista. I’m slowly getting used to Vista and getting everything up and running. So far I like it ok. It’s very “pretty” and seems more polished than even XP, but it’s not really much faster (and that’s on a faster PC too sadly).  Either Vista or the multi-cores handle multi-tasking better and multiple apps start up without slowing down other apps. There’s a few compatibility/migration issues. I finally got around moving iTunes from one PC to the other. It’s not too hard once you figure out the right steps. Office XP/2002 doesn’t seem happy so I’m seriously considering switching to OpenOffice and Thunderbird/Lightning.