I'm Getting a New Computer.....No I'm Not!

Last night, I again priced out a Dell system. They've just had another price drop and were offering some decent specials, so I actually convinced myself to place an order. It's been almost four years since I've bought a desktop system. My home PC is a 350MHz Pentium II. That's a long time between upgrades for anyone, but especially for a geek like me.

Trying to get the most bang for my buck, here's basically what I went with:

• Dell Dimension 4600
  
• 3 GHz Pentium 4 hyperthreaded processor with 800MHz front side bus
  
• 512MB dual channel 400MHz SDRAM
  
• 17 inch LCD - this one's not great, but they only give you $50 credit if you don't get any display at all. I'd like to upgrade to one of the fast Samsung's or a ViewSonic later
  
• 128MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro - an impressive gamer's video card. This thing alone has more processor power than most of my previous computers.
  
• 120GB serial ATA hard drive
  
• WinXP Professional
  
• Logitech MX500 optical mouse
  
• SoundBlaster Audigy 2 with Dolby 5.1 and Firewire
  
• 5.1 Speaker system
  
• DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives - it's cheaper to buy a LiteOn DVD+-RW drive from NewEgg later for $100 and swap out the CD-RW to get DVD write capability
  

The total with tax and shipping was $1300 and something. This machine should do circles around my old one and it's got enough space for the growing MP3 collection (over 30GB!) and enough video and processor power to get back into gaming (if time ever allows). It'll handle video editing from our Digital 8 camera with FireWire and be able to burn creations to DVD. The LCD display will take up less space, although I'll probably want to use the dual-monitor capability of the video card and keep both displays. The sound should be top-notch and even the mouse is a significant upgrade over our old-school ball mouse.

Then I had some time to think about it.

With two kids, we don't use the computer at home as much as we used to. When we do, it's now mostly for web surfing and email. But we still do a fair amount of photo editing and design/publishing. We do still have 2 desktops and a laptop, though they're all ancient by today's or even yesterday's standards. And it is almost $1400. And we could do without it even longer.

So I cancelled the order. Perhaps another day. Perhaps.
Posted by Chris on 3/25/2004 10:17:00 AM :: Permalink   
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