So… the machine. It has an Intel dual Core E6400 chip; an Asus 22″ widescreen monitor with 2ms refresh; 360Gb HDD, 2Gb RAM, TV tuner, Wireless card, webcam and the rest… and Windows Vista Home Premium Edition.
It’s actually quite a substantial machine to be honest. Not quite ‘state of the art’ but close enough to it for my purposes. Ok I *could* have set up a RAID configuration with multiple redundancy in case of HDD failure… but I’ve never been convinced in a home environment that’s exactly a necessity. I could have had a top of the line chip… but why pay $1600 *extra* for that when this one could be over clocked to reach the same speeds? Not that I’ll do it… i’m no overclocker… the machines I have work as well as I want or need them too usually 🙂
The screen is the greatest improvements. My previous moniutor was a 21″ beast of a CRT and so heavy the desk was seriously collapsing under the strain. This one is bigger, brighter, and has more ‘real estate’ available to work with. Very nice indeed!
Windows Vista? Well so far I’ve not played with it long enough to make any concrete assessment but so far it all works as well as you’d expect… though of course lots of the controls I’m used to aren’t quite as easy to locate or use. Right now, in the same way I was happy with Win 98 even after I started using XP… I’m thinking I was happy with XP now I’m using Vista 🙂
Sooner or later I’d have had to move I suppose. And when all was said and done XP was really only a new front end to Win NT/2000. Vista is a new operating system built from the ground up. I’m, still questioning however whether, since it took so many years to build, if it is truly in touch with the requirements of the ‘modern’ online world? We’ll see. Right now I’d give it a tentative thumbs up.
As for the machine… well it *has* to better than the old simply because it works :). Will it *still* be ok in 3 – 4 years time when the Registry is choked with the hundreds of apps I’ll have installed and discarded by then?
Only way to find out is to live with it and see how we go. It’s paid for now… so like it or not… I’m stuck with it 😀
The Eclectic Interweb 