The family computer crapped out a couple of months ago. It's been so long that the details are fuzzy, but I seem to recall I was trying to add an additional hard drive and ran into irreparable problems. It was one of those things where, for various reasons, I couldn't move forward, nor could I move back.
My employer had recently updated my computer with a new notebook, so I had my 3+ year-old notebook sitting unused. Taking the easy way out, I put the family onto the laptop with the best of intentions of fixing the old desktop (PII 300, if I remember correctly) or replacing it (yeah, right — like I'm going to get around to doing either one of those).
Well, tonight my hand was forced. The laptop died (I suspect it was the drive controller, since on bootup it said it can't find a hard drive or an optical drive, and it's got one hard drive and two optical drives) and the family was without a computer. The driving force here was the fact that the wife sent an email to our daughter's band director, and expected and needed an immediate response (none so far, in case you're wondering).
I really like Dell computers (and I can't rationally justify it — I just like Dells, so sue me), so I went to their web site to see what kind of computer I could build, what the cost would be and how long it would take to deliver it. I should have known this wouldn't work out, because regardless of the cost, I couldn't find a way to get a computer I wanted to ship before December 28th. Non-starter, dude.
So at 8:30 I'm rushing out the door to Best Buy to fill the Garrett family computer deficiency. Since I'd seen a highly favorable review of the HP 1170n (I'd provide a link, but that powerhouse PC manufacturer HP doesn't have anything on their web site about this computer — yeah, they're gonna go places, mark my words) a while back, I've been looking at it off and on. The big positive it had in its favor was a removable 170 GB hard drive, in addition to the standard 200 GB internal hard drive. I was a little concerned that it only came with 512 MB of RAM — and with RAM especially, more is almost always better.
My conscience required me to do at least a little due diligence, so I started looking around Best Buy's computer section to see what other computers they might have that would meet our needs. In that process, I stumbled across the Gateway 820GM, and to make an already too long story short, I opted for the Gateway. Ultimately, I chose it over the HP because the HP's most attractive feature (the removable 170 GB hard drive) seemed uncompelling in actual use, whereas the Gateway has 1 GB of RAM (compared to the HP's 512 MB). And computer geeks know that more RAM is always better.
So I'm going to be spending the next several days or weeks figuring out how Windows Media Center works, and how I need to upgrade every other piece of electronic equipment to take advantage of all our new capabilities.
