It snowed here yesterday. Coincidentally we had to drive into town for routine appointments with the eye doctor, but fortunately the roads weren’t particularly bad. Today it’s sunny and quite pretty outside:
I took delivery of a new PC earlier in the week. In order to keep up with the marketing hype that is foisting stuff onto sheep-like consumers whether they need it or not exciting new advances in CPU and operating-system technologies, Audio Damage needs me to be running a 64-bit version of Windows 7. My main PC is a bit long in the tooth and pretty much at the end of its sensible upgrade path, so rather than putting Windows 7 on it I decided to start afresh with a new machine. In the past I’ve built my own PCs from hand-picked components. One can save a fair amount of money with this approach, at the expense of a fair amount of time. I’m feeling somewhat short on time these days so I decided to let someone else do the component-picking and building for me. (Also, computers are deductible business expenses; time isn’t.) There are already three Dell computers in the house that have been generally well-behaved (although the one I use as a file server has developed an odd tendency to put itself into hibernation for no apparent reason), so I configured a new Dell at their web store and said, “make it so!” metaphorically speaking.
I’m not particularly up on contemporary computer specs so it came as something of a surprise that the smallest amount of RAM I could configure (in the model I chose, an XPS 8100) was 8GB, and the smallest hard drive I could have put in it was 750GB. I’ve been cheerfully working for several years on a machine with 2GB of RAM whose C: volume occupies about 95GB. The dual-thread features of the Intel i7 had also escaped my notice, so it was a moment of shock and awe when I opened the Task Manager for the first time and found eight “CPUs” rather than the four I expected. Yeah, okay, I’m getting old. At least I still don’t need bifocals or reading glasses yet (just barely, according to the eye doctor). Nonetheless, I am enjoying the new 23″ LCD.
