My new 'puter

I have mixed feelings about my new computer. We bought it for a couple reasons.

1. I wanted it
2. I thought I had enough money

I bought our previous computer from TigerDirect for less than $300. It seemed like a bargain. It has served us well for the past few years. It was the first time that I truly got irritated at Microsoft enough to abandon their operating system. I bought a new computer and added memory to it. I had to re-authenticate the operating system for putting in memory. I tried to do the update online. It would not let me. I tried to call in the update and I was required to read out a 40 character code and write in a new 40 character code. I decided I did not need to be treated like a thief for something that I had just bought. I formatted the hard drive and installed Suse 10.0.

With my previous success at buying from TigerDirect I decided to chance it again and buy a system. I acted in a fashion akin to going to the store hungry to do shopping for food. I bought all the things that sounded like dessert.

The new systems has a dual core 64-bit AMD cpu. I chose AMD because Intel is starting to act too much like Microsoft and put the dollar before the customer. Money was still a consideration, so I did not buy the latest and fastest.

I added in a monitor, because the old monitors I owned were big and clunky. I have a flat screen monitor at work and I like it. I went for the 19" monitor. I works well.

I wanted more disk space. The 40 gigabytes on the laptop and the 80 gigabytes on the desktop were just not enough to hold the music and pictures that I wanted. I decided to go for 500 gigabytes -- twice. One TERABYTE.

The machine came with the option of getting either XP or Vista. I opted for XP. Debra received a portable player for Christmas and wanted to use iTunes. I thought it would be easier to just use XP and avoid the horrible things I have heard about Vista. I am glad that I avoided Vista.

I had enough disk space to put more than one operating system on the new box. I opted to try kubuntu. I like it. It is awesome for installing applications. There is a program called apt-get that accesses the internet, downloads the package(s) from a server, and installs the program with all the dependencies. It is wonderful.

While I was at it I bought a pair of speakers and a webcam. The speakers are in use frequently playing music, but the webcam gets little use. Maybe as time goes on I will find a use for the webcam. Maybe I can do videoconferencing with mine bruder if we figure out how.

Now comes the task of using up that 1 terabyte of disk space. I started loading on all the pictures that we had in electronic format. That used about 2% of one of the disks. I ripped cd music to allow for playing on the computer and that used up another 2%. We have several DVD movies. I thought that I would rip some of those and make them available to play on the computer. That ate up 200 gigabytes in a hurry. Most of them were cheesy b-movies in sets. Maybe I will do more over time.

Now I have the computer booted into linux almost all the time. I don't trust Microsoft.