The New Computer

I think I've written before about how difficult I find it to part with a large sum of money; in fact I think it was in reference to the new computer I desperately needed.

Depending on how you define desperately.

And that was part of the problem: the computer worked, just slowly.

After much agonizing and way too many hours comparing things like bus speeds and pci slots, I bit the bullet before Thanksgiving and the parts started trickling in. Devoted partner spared me the effort of assembling the computer (though I did install my own dvd drive and OS which makes me not at all badass) and the disparate parts and their gigaherzes cohered into something that looks like your average Dell.

Then it was time to boot up and dive in.

First impressions: I do not love Windows 7, purely from a UI perspective. I don't like icons and shading and a computer telling me how I want things displayed. I want to tell it how to display things. Now we're early on in our relationship and I might be able to achieve the level of customization I'm looking for as time goes on, but as it stands, there's some work to be done.

The same cannot be said for the speed issue. I knew my old computer was slow. After all, it was a 5-year old motherboard maxed out on ram and a petrie dish of various active and removed virii, malware, and the like (now since eradicated with a wipe of everything so that Julie, its inheritor, need only experience slowness, not disease). The new computer is fast. Really fast.

The greatest example I can give is of the Adobe Lightroom functionality. Lightroom is a photo manipulation software package that LITERALLY took 1 minute per photo on the old machine just to import. Think about that when you think about the 300 pictures you took of your nephew's birthday party. As a result I didn't work on my photos much because I just didn't have the requisite 3 days I would need to get through them. New computer loads a folder full of photos in under 60 seconds. As a result, should you be so interested in the evidence of our least successful vacation ever, the Nicaragua pictures are now up. Amy says I should take down the one of myself at the end, but I think it's important that people realize just how sick I was on vacation. But it is not a pretty picture. At all.

Black plague photos aside, I now have a machine that works for what I need. I'm doing some things differently, though. I'm a great devotee of google docs and, as such, have not installed my MS Office (hopelessly outdated I'm sure). I'm also going to attempt to live without photoshop (but I know in my deepest of hearts that this will not last and I will be asking my soon-to-be sister-in-law to get me an educational copy ere long). I also didn't bother reinstalling many of my games. In fact I only installed one to test the graphics capabilities of my bangin' new graphics card. Instead, I'm merely reveling in the next 6 months of non-obsolescence and hoping that I don't have to buy another computer for another 7 years.