Saturday, August 12, 2006

Upgrade

I have just had a nice computer upgrade and Miss Dell here is running so much better now! I got this machine around March or April 2001 after I wrecked my Compaq during a virus attack. I am convinced I did more damage trying to repair the virus than the virus itself. The old Compaq never ran right again, as in a flurry of activity (and my total ignorance of virus attacks) I think I deleted some important files while the virus corrupted the rest. I used it at my sister's for an internet back-up but it was so screwed up it was a pain to use. I gave it away and I am sure someone gutted it and made it nice again.

But I had not the skills and time to do that, so armed with a new job and thus some cash, I bought this Dell Dimension 8100. Got the best I could afford and have been pleased as punch for the last 5 years. Only the cruddy Windows ME that was installed was crap. But the hard drive had seen a lot of use, and was small compared to the newer ones. Only 40 mega or giga (never sure which is which) bites, it was running out of room. So now I have a new 80 and kept the old 40. Programs are on the old drive and moving data to the new one. Someday, I'll reverse that and have the programs on the new one and the data on the old. We also added some memory so I now have 256 instead of 128 whosiewatches of memory.

The old gal runs a lot better now and doesn't take an hour deciding what to do. I have more space to store junk, but at the same time I am cleaning out a lot of duplicates and old back-up files and stuff. She will hopefully be good to go for a while.

I did have about 24 hours away from the computer and realized I have a serious addiction! Even watched some TV, it was dull.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, you deserve it, man. I'm the same way. TV is fine, but passive. However, the computer is interactive, and I can learn from it and with sites like newzbin and the usenet, I can be entertained by downloading and watching the latest movies without ever paying for them, and all kinds of other things, such as fully researching a product before purchase. I did this recently with a Little Giant ladder purchase, and yes, the goddamn thing is mindblowing well designed and built to last forever.

And then there are things like this that merely blow my freakin' mind:

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/northwoods.html

Anonymous said...

PS: Just get in the habit of backing up your data once a month or two on CD/DVD. And just keep all your old backup copies. They won't take up much space, and you never know when might need a file from way back in 2006 someday.