It’s official: I’m getting a new computer.
It’s been 5 years since I created my current computer, Mobius. With an 800Mhz AMD Duron CPU and 512MB of memory, it’s not much – but it has served me well over the years. It’s been a most reliable computer. I’ve added faster CD burners, an extra 80GB of hard drive space, and even a DVD-RW… but as time moves on, old Mobius is showing its age. Firefox doesn’t come up as quickly as I’d like… and things like Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver take intolerably long to load. It’s also becoming… quirky. After the addition of the 2nd hard drive, Mobius refused to boot – saying “Invalid Boot Device.” Throwing in a bootable CD into the drive (but not booting from it; just letting it time out) solved this problem – but you can understand why such behavior started to make me nervous. Not being able to boot my only home computer – with all of its precious data – would be quite a blow to me. So it was time to think about replacing the old workhorse.
At first, I thought I’d be able to save up & afford a sweet gaming PC, such as one from Alienware. However, one of those babies is still out of my reach – for now. But I did want something that could play some decent games – after all, I like games – and would still be a respectable everyday-use computer. So I turned to Dell, and their XPS line of PCs.
In the end, I ened up choosing a Dell XPS 400 (purchased from their “factory refurbished” section at nearly 1/2 price!) with a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 Hyper-Threading processor, 1GB of memory, and a 160GB hard drive. (An upgrade to a 17″ or 19″ LCD screen is forthcoming.)
This new system will be named Elysion. It is the latest in a long and distinguished line of computers – starting with the venerable HAL1600 (a used PC running DOS, Windows 3.1), up through HomeOne (an IBM Aptiva running Windows 95), Sanctuary (a home-built computer running Windows 98), and Mobius (a home-built computer running Windows 2000).
Naturally, this new computer will require quite a bit of work before I can actually use it. For example, I’m going to have to get rid of all that junk that Dell puts on their systems – either by un-installing it or by wiping the hard drive and re-installing Windows XP (Media Center Edition 2005, no less) from scrach – assuming it comes with the requisite CDs, and not just some generic “hard drive image restoration” program. Then, I can plug it into my network and begin transferring the 80GB or so of data that I need to move over – all of the pictures, movies, music, documents, and other files that I’ve collected over the years, as well as things like 8 years of email, browser settings, web site backups, and so forth. Once that’s done, I can begin installing the programs I use – and so far, the list I’ve drawn up takes up the better part of a page!
Still, it’ll be quite an adventure – and it’ll be nice to play games on the PC again. I’m dying to see what some of my older games (like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter) look like on a truly powerful machine (Mobius was never truly powerful enough to play them at the highest quality setting). As the system is scheduled to be delivered to my office on Monday, expect to hear all about the process of upgrading during the next week!
A truly new PC – at last!
