TCB

I've taken care of a whole bunch of things today that I was putting off.
Maria and I did a bunch of Christmas shopping our favorite way – mousing our way around Amazon.com.
And I finally bit the bullet and bought that new business computer that we've been needing. After weighing the relative merits of Mac and PC, I opted to remain in the PC fold and ordered a Dell through Leo Laporte's web link at twit.tv/dell.
I've dealt with Dell before and, like Leo, find them to be a company I can feel comfortable with.
So I bought an XPS 700 Special Edition Formula Red with Intel Core2Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive and a 24” Dell UltraSharp Widescreen Digital Flat Panel monitor.
It comes with a free upgrade from XP Media Center to Vista when the new operating system is released late next month.
Since the new Dell cases have bays for two additional hard drives, I can yank the two drives out of my old computer and have all of the files on board without having to do a lot of transferring. In terms of familiarity, it should be like my old machine on steroids (going from a 2400 MHz processor to a 1.86 GHz processor) with a display twice as wide as the one I have now.
At last, I should be have a machine that runs Photoshop fast enough to stay ahead of me. I'm stalled out on a current wedding album project because my computer is choking on the big Nikon D200 and D100 images to be manipulated.
And, since the temperature got into the mid-40s this afternoon, I was able to check and correct tire pressures on both cars (the del Sol's little donut spare tire had zero psi) and put fuel stabilizer into the gas tanks of both bikes and the lawnmower.
That little Sears air compressor paid for itself a long time ago when it comes to convenience. I hate crawling around my car at a gas station topping off tire pressures.