Crash!!!

At long last my workhorse is DEAD! Despite this death, there is actually excitement and happiness. What do I mean by my workhorse? I mean the long serving home desktop computer that I use as the hub for every computing need in my house.

(The guts of the old workhorse exposed so that I can get the hard drive out.)

We use this computer for just about everything. Some of the key things we do with this machine are: use it to edit and manage our key family photos and videos, maintain our master library of songs (MP3), use it to stream music to various audio devices throughout the house, maintain my master library of "reference" work documents, store my Quicken files, store my my entire genealogy database, edit and produce this blog and of course the most important use.... allow Zack to play Microsoft Windows based computer games - LOL! I have had this computer for over five years. I purchased it in January of 2005 when the previous workhorse suffered a fatal hard drive error. This time death was due to a failed power supply. I can tell from the indicator lights on the power supply it is receiving power from the cord but it isn't distributing the power to the motherboard. Since this computer was already 5 years old and was becoming a dinosaur unable to handle many of the demands placed upon it the time had come to get a new machine and move to the latest and greatest technology that was available.

So yesterday Zack and I went out computer shopping. We first went to Costco and did a quick scan of the models that they had available. I liked what I saw but felt I had to also check out Best Buy. I spent about 20 minutes looking around at Best Buy until I decided I had found the model that I wanted. I went with an HP Pavilon Elite with an AMD Phenom II X4 925 processor, 1 TB of hard disk, 8 GB of memory, an ATI Radeon 512MB Video Card and built in wireless 802.11g networking. In general it's a pretty beefy machine. I kind of figured if this machine is going to last as long as the previous machine I might as well go with a machine that is near the top of the line. I did splurge in the fact that I bought a new monitor with it. Instead of just hooking it up to my old 20 inch CRT monitor, I also purchase a 23 inch flat screen High Def monitor. That little accessory was totally and completely unneeded but with the way they "package" the monitor and CPU it was a better deal.

(The new monitor before Zack and I got it hooked up.)

This blog post is being written from the new computer. It is the first thing I am doing from it. There is still a ton of work to do to get it configured the way I want it - so it will take some time to get full productive. But given the state of the old work horse it is good to have the new machine up and running.

I hope everyone is having a great week!

Thanks and peace to all! ~J.