Getting back on line

The end of the year is a quiet time at work, but I've been busy.  Not only am I still picking up the pieces after last week's power failure, but now there are lots of new toys for Christmas, and everything needs to be installed and configured.

The most interesting things to you dear MSDN blog readers are, of course, are my computers.  For home, you'd be proud to see me running a brand new Dell Dimension E9200.  I had it assembled with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (the 2.4GHz one) and a 320GB internal drive. Only 1GB of RAM so far -- I'll wait till the prices drop a bit and the current speed stops feeling blazing. 

Today at work I finally upgraded my ancient HP desktop.  It's been my main machine since the Bubble Days of 2001, and it's served me well all the way through Vista. It was a very well-made computer with a big, fast, drive and easy to expand. I loved that machine. But time moves on, and today I traded it in for a new Optiplex. It's almost identical to my home machine (E6600), but it comes pre-loaded with RAID and a few other goodies that I had to add separately on my home machine.

And yes of course the first thing I did when I took both computers out of their boxes was to load them with Vista and Office 2007.

Lots of other toys for home too -- network printer, 802.11N router, external hard drives -- all of which need configuring and various tweaking to get right. I don't upgrade very often (it's my first new home machine in 3 years), so after I take the plunge I like to get everything set up perfectly. All of this takes hours and hours of time, and now I'm almost done.