Got a new PC!

[CustomStrat]

Early last year my desktop pc took a hit in a thunderstorm and...ceased to be. Since then I've been using my laptop which was running Windows 7 beta and subsequently the Evaluation/Release Edition. I wasn't expecting to field test it quite as extensively as I wound up doing but after a year I can say without reservation that Windows 7 is the best operating system that Microsoft has come up with.

It's much leaner and cleaner than Vista which, even at it's best, was slow and cumbersome and it makes XP seem positively geriatric. My ex-pc had been running XP with 2.5GB of RAM but it seemed so slow compared to the laptop with 1GB of RAM on Win7.

In any case, with the approach of March 2010, and the expiration of the evaluation I had to decide if I wanted to keep using my laptop and letting it revert to Vista, upgrade it to Win7 or start from scratch, as it were...

I bought a Win7 upgrade and whilst window shopping on eBay found a pc deal that seemed impossible to resist. For $240 and free shipping I bought an Acer AX1200; 2.3GHZ AMD Sempron, 3GB RAM, 320GB hard drive, dual layer DVD-RW, HDMI and it even came with keyboard, mouse and speakers. It was running Vista for less than 24 hours before I upgraded to Win7.

Fortunately, I keep nearly everything (hundreds of films, thousands of pieces of music, hundreds of thousands of photos, etc) on a bank of external hard drives (1.2TB worth) so it was simply a matter of reinstalling some essential software and then some. I've got a cracking new machine running a solid and thoroughly reliable operating system.

I'm feeling well and truly chuffed!

[Dave]

Sounds as if it's time for us to upgrade Kay's laptop, then.

It's a Toshiba Satellite M200 with Vista Home Basic installed. We bought it 18 months ago to replace our aged Acer Inspire 4000, and it was hellish slow whenever the two of us were logged on at the same time - or indeed whenever either of us had more than a couple of programs running at the same time. A memory upgrade from 512 MB to 2 GB (the maximum it could cope with) helped, but it's still pretty sluggish. Which is a shame, because it's otherwise quite a nice machine.

Meanwhile, Kay's running WinXP as her only OS and I have it as one of mine on both my desktop and my netbook (I spend most of my time on Linux - currently Linux Mint 8 ("Helena")). It'd be as well to have a version of Windows 7 for cross-compatibility testing.

[ruggie]

And I thought I was doing well getting something similar for GBP350! Anyway it's way cheaper than I could get it in France.

Now that I'm shooting video clips as if they were sheets of paper on a sketchpad (and never getting round to editing them ) I think I'll get one or even two more external drives. Seems safer to have two or three 640Gig than one Terabyte drive, as well as being more flexible now that I'll have 3 working PCs...