So I want a new computer...

It's been a long time coming, and I'm not quite there yet. But it is really time I updated my hardware to something a little more reasonable. Probably the biggest hint that it's time to move on and put my old Celeron D to pasture was when I was flipping through that package of ads that come with the Sunday paper and saw one ad for a Dell PC. It was one of those ultra tight budget PC's, the ones that cost you like $300 after rebate and come with a monitor and printer. Curiously I glanced at the stats on that rig and my face dropped. By all accounts this $300 computer was better than my PC. Every single piece of hardware was three times as good as what I had, for less than half the price I paid for mine.

Now when I look at my PC I don't see the old but formidable machine that has got me through years of happiness. I see an old nag, a breed of questionable pedigree that has seen it's last race. I don't plan to ever throw old Hachan away. She can surf the internet as well as any, and could always make a good backup in the future if her replacement needs to go in for some work or something particularly horrible happens. It's happened before, Hachan had a penchant for dying often and brutally, just like her namesake. And my previous model, with nonexistent memory and running off a first edition Win98, would often step in so I could at least read the news.

As for my new computer. I don't really know where to start. I've mentioned before that running the numbers comes up to about $3000-$4000 for what I consider a good, long lasting investment. Looking at those numbers though, and knowing myself as well as I do, I don't know if I could save up that long. There are a few standards I have as far as what needs to be in that new rig, and those are a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate, a BluRay Disc Drive, and at least 500gigs of space on my harddrive.

Whatever your feeling is on Sony, there's no question that BluRay is the new disc format, not putting a BluRay drive in my PC now is like not putting a DVD drive in my computer at the start of the millennium, it's just nonsensical.

I also don't really know who to buy through. I want something good now, and I can go and buy something great later. Granted if I knew somebody who knew how to put a computer together from scratch I could save a lot of money. I don't though, at least I don't think so...