My new baby
Looks like I'm ready to retire my Gateway 5300 laptop. She's getting ready to turn 4-years old and the ol' girl isn't what she used to be. When I selling said brand of computers and working as a trainer for that company I was fond of saying "You know, if you never upgrade the software, your machine will never run any slower or seem to be old." I guess I did too many upgrades. Maxing the RAM when it was new also didn't give me a chance to speed her up later in life. And the screen was getting dim and a bit blurry, me and Victorinox repaired the keyboard frequently of late, and the hard drive was getting full. And I was just itching to get a new machine anyway. I'm a geek at heart, though these days I seldom practice the art.
So bought a Hewlett-Packard HPzv5410us. Sah-weet. She has a 15.4" (diagonal) screen, a screaming (or at least moaning very loudly) 64-bit processor, awesome Harmon/Kardon speakers, a good size hard drive, and 512 Mb of RAM that can be quadrupled as needed. All for under a grand. I paid just over two grand for the Gateway when she was new.
Now that my 833 songs have been moved into their new home and I've moved all the documents (see my priorities?) as well as finished installing and tweaking software I guess I'll pack away the old girl for a week or so to make sure everything is fine with the new one then wipe what I need to from the hard drive and try to find a new home for her. Of course, she's listening to all this as I've set her up to share her drive with my new machine via my home wireless network.
And that's been pretty cool. Not that I haven't worked with networks before. More than once in my various jobs over the years have I transferred files from one machine to another in the same building or even the same room just because I could (or really needed to in many instances). But there's something about doing it at home that is a bit of a thrill. Maybe I won't get rid of the 5300, but find some use for her in the home. Maybe a music server for my stereo. I tried to find a copy of Windows Media Center to use her as an ersatz TiVo, but it's probably as well that I didn't as her hard drive is merely 20 Gb (Ha! My first machine had 20 Mb!).
Wonder if I should retire the Gateway cows in my living room?
