New Computer

I recently got a new desktop. I bought it from the same fellow from whom my brother had recently purchased a system. He found the guy on Craig's List. I've had mine about three weeks and he's had his for 8+. So far, we've had no problems and are very satisfied.

$350 bought me a 3.4 ghz Pentium D (D is for dual) Dell Optiplex 745 with 2 gb of RAM, a 140 gb harddrive, a dvd reader/cd burner combo drive, and a 19" flat panel Dell monitor and included the original Windows XP disk and the Dell drivers disk. The computer came with no virtually no software other than the OS installed on it which was very nice.

Having the Windows install disk is a big relief. One of the reasons I needed to upgrade was because my last computer could not be updated beyond WinXP service pack 1. I had originally bought the system used and did not fully understand that I was getting something with a bootlegged OS. Eventually, Windows stopped allowing me to get updates. After a while - SP2 was released way back in '04 - other computer programs quit running well since my OS wasn't up to date. That's all solved now and everything seems remarkably faster.

I'm still going through and getting all of the necessary programs downloaded. I've got the Google suite, Firefox and Thunderbird, anti-virus, FTP, iTunes, Trillian IM, VLC, uTorrent, and a handful of others so far. GIMPShop and OpenOffice are downloading now. It's fun getting all of the necessities all loaded up and working. It's just so amazing that everything is free. I have a number of links noted that all talk about the best freeware programs that are out there, and I look forward to really getting this baby zipping along.

Jonathan 9/17/2007 05:51:00 PM