Dude, You’re Getting…
Clearly I’m in major gadget buying mode. Earlier this week the new DVD player arrived in the mail. Yesterday evening I came home from work to receive my new Dell Inspiron 8200.
I’m scared of it.
I mean, damn, this is a big, fancy, powerful machine. 1.8 Ghz?!? Good gravy. I’m not sure what to do with that. And it’s friggin’ big — it’s got a 15″ display at 1400 x 1050 resolution, for crying out loud. I’ve had smaller CRT monitors. There so much screen real estate I could rent some of it to a small third world nation.
It’s sitting here on my desk next to the last laptop I bought, a Gateway2000 Solo purchased refurbished back in 1996. (Of course, since 1997 or so, I’ve always had an IBM Thinkpad provided by work.) It makes the old Gateway look like one of those toy computers you buy for your four-year old niece. Tell the truth, some of those toy computers probably have more power than the ol’ Gateway (90 Mhz Pentium, 16 MB RAM). Hell, the video card in this new Dell has four times the RAM of the entire Gateway.
And then there’s Windows XP — all blue and bubbly and 3-D. And it wants to be my friend. Really badly.