Sorry I’ve been absent from blogging for a while – my old Dell Dimension 4550 PC (which has lasted me just 2months shy of 5 years) practically failed. The power fan had been making funny noises for nearly 2 years on and off (rectified by just blindly plunging a screwdriver into the back of the power unit when it made a noise – not at all recommended) and the primary hard drive started failing. Yes, I know I could have just replaced the hard drive (at a cost of around 70 GBP for over 200Gb), but I couldn’t run certain large photo-editing applications on it as it had a measly 3/4Gb of RAM 🙁
So I splurged out with a combination of a new widescreen TFT Samsung SyncMaster 2032BW monitor from PC World – £180 (my old CRT was still in perfect working order after the nearly 5 years usage, but took up so much desk space), an extra 2GB kit (1GBx2), Ballistix 240-pin DIMM RAM from Crucial (£49.99) and the biggest purchase of all – a Dell Dimension XPS 420 with an Intel Viiv Q6600 Quad Core 2.40Ghz Processor, 2Gb RAM (giving a total of 4Gb), 16x DVD+/- RW drive (at long last – the old Dimension could never write DVDs for some reason), 512MB Nvidia Geforce 8800GT card, 2x 500Gb Hard drives and Microsoft Vista Ultimate. Total price (including VAT and delivery) – £760.75.
Was I disappointed and what did I think of Vista?