Computer thoughts

I get asked a lot about what is going on with computers and is it a good time to upgrade. As with most questions like that we nerds have to say, "It depends!!!!"

My personal view is that it is an excellent time to upgrade or change out your desktop computer if you have not done so in the past 2 years. Dual core Intel and AMD processors are great they are responsive and truly add a lot of zip to your computing experience. Make sure that the system board you purchase can take up to 8 GB of RAM. Memory is very cheap right now and you should buy 2 or 3 GB in your new PC. Hard drive technology with the SATA interface has become so affordable as well. Your machine can have a vast 160 to 500 GB drive for around $100 bill!

There are some slick things you can do with your new desktop as well. I really like to find a good board that supports RAID at the hardware level. I use this to take two SATA drives and then mirror them. You have one of the ultimate backups! You will actually be writing to both drives which gives you a copy of your programs and data in case of failure. Nice feature that usually is only used on a server.

What about a laptop? Unless you need the mobility or want the convenience of moving your pc from your bedroom to the kitchen counter then to the coffee table still kind of pricey. Sure you can get a cheapo Celeron or Sempron chip and granted those cpus have improved but still are slackers when you want to do more than one application at one time. The prices are low $399 to $499 with rebates but my money would go into a rocking desktop right now.

Vista? Ummm... I have been taking Vista off for people over the past year. It is horrid, simply a royal pain in the ass to work with. It fights you on the networks and can't print to anything. It takes forever to boot up as well. I have not looked at the SP 1 release yet but I trust it is much better.