New Computer
I bought a new PC last week. Work had one on offer for £199 and after the VAT reduction and staff discount this worked out at £175. For my money I got an Intel Pentium Dual Core unit with a 19" LCD Widescreen monitor.
It came pre-installed with Vista which I'm not over keen on so my first task was to make a note of all the installed hardware and carry out a fresh install of Windows XP. Inside the case there was only one free ATA connection but this was enough for me to pop in my data hard drive. Had a bit of fun getting webcam number 3 working but after reinstalling the driver it started to work ok. The major problem was getting the Playstation game controller working. For this I had to carry out a search on the web - turns out that XP installs it's own drivers for this, which don't work... After deleting drivers and performing a number of restarts the pad came to life. I was surprised the the USB video card and second monitor worked fine.
So far, I'm very impressed with the machine. Though I'm not a big gamer it is nice to be able to run some of the more recent games and I'm sure all my emulation stuff is going to run just fine. The widescreen monitor is fantastic. I watch a large amount of TV and movies on the PC, and the picture quality cannot be faulted.
After a week I'm finally getting the software side of it just how I like it. Fortunately the majority of my software was on the data drive so the installations went like a dream.