Maybe Not!

After Friday's triumphant declaration it appears that problems with the PC rose their ugly head again on Saturday. It's been 3 years since I put the system together and its been in constant use, even so, its not ancient. My wife was seriously annoyed by the lack of stability of it and we both decided we couldn't do without a properly working home computer, so we did something that I've never done before. We visited PC World! We firstly wrote down all of the applications we regularly use and some things that we like doing like photo editing and storage, music storage and playback, shopping online, watching video online and so on - the list goes on but its pretty standard family stuff we probably all do. So we took the list with us and spoke to a person. To clarify what I have never done before, I have bought other stuff at PC World, but this time I actually trusted someone else to tell us what to buy. I haven't the time to keep on top of all the processors and issues anymore, so I allowed myself to be guided by someone who hadn't long left school. He seemed intelligent enough and was willing to offer us deals so that we could take away a machine that day - I wanted to capture video from my camcorder and the machine he was recommending didn't have a firewire card, so he offered to install one along with replacing the graphics card with a more beefed-up one. We ended up buying a machine with a dual core quad processor thingymajig, which apparently usually is something you'd expect to find in a 1000 pound plus machine. We had a max limit of half that so we did well and we didn't need a monitor either, so saved a few pounds there. It was ready really quickly and we had it home in less than 2 hours, which was great because we had a good morning in town at the library and weren't rushing around to cram everything in - we strolled around PC World just after lunch. The other amusing thing was that my wife recognised the salesman as the brother of a boy she teaches.

It took me all night to move files and settings and stuff from the old PC to the new, its not as smooth a process as it could be and Windows has some limitations in the way it operates. We have now to get used to a new version of Windows (Vista), which isn't proving to be too hard thankfully.

The funny thing is, I working now on the machine that wasn't working yesterday! So far it is behaving itself today, which is quite annoying on one level and on another level I'm quite grateful because we needed files and stuff and will probably need to keep it going for a few months until we're sure everything is on the new one.