New computer
I just switched to a new computer. In the past I’ve usually put together my own PCs, so a new machine meant waiting for parts to show up from ten different places and then fighting with them for weeks until everything works.
This time I didn’t feel like messing with hardware, so I just walked into a store and bought an HP Pavilion a350n. This is a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 and has roughly the same components I would have chosen myself. As PCs are becoming more of a commodity, it would have been difficult to beat the price by building my own.
There’s nothing like buying a computer, plugging it in, and being able to use it right away. I’ve been very impressed with this machine so far, although there have been a few minor issues. I’ll be writing more about some of those issues here, as well as some of the good things.