Curing the Seven Year Itch

After seven years of scratching the same itch, I finally got the balm that did it. What, pray tell, am I referring to? Well, it's a NEW computer by golly! Yes, due to a slight thaw in my domestic budget freeze, and to issues that were really getting out of hand with my aging home computer, I finally took the plunge and bought a very decent HP desktop complete with Windows 7 Home Premium. With my HP employee discount (okay, only 10% but it's something), and a "quick ship" (preconfigured) discount, it was only $564 plus tax. See the details here (public prices only). It was $100 less than the same model at my local Office Depot.

Am I happy? Are you kidding? Honestly, just about anything new would have been a noticable improvement, but this one is "pretty darn good" and, given my tendency to let things itch, it will have to do for about another 5 to 7 years. So, I couldn't go with too much "yesterday" in the technology.

Now, moving from Windows XP after so long to Windows 7 was obviously a case of "how do I do what I knew how to do?"--just like when I moved up to XP from Windows 98. Had I not had a little experience overseeing a Windows Vista computer at my church, I'd have been more lost. Still, I'm finding that there's a LOT under the hood in Vista/7, and ultimately it's a good move.

Now, what is there I could still want? Well, from everything I've heard, Windows is VERY noticably faster when you use a solid state hard drive (aka SSD). So, while I'm very happy with my snappy new PC (pretty hard not to notice the difference given the comparision), another $100 in a year or so will probably put me into an SSD. But of course the price point is much higher per GB of storage ($3/GB vs. 20-30 cents/GB for a regular drive). But my plan is to replace only the BOOT drive with SSD technology and use my existing 1 TB (!) drive for my Documents (etc). So, 80GB is just fine. Sure, this isn't quite the performance boost of a pure SSD system, but I got a budget you know! So, that's my next step. What about yours?