So we bit the bullet and bought a new computer last night. I believe the computer I use at home on a (somewhat) daily basis was bought before I started this blog. I tried searching through the pages of the blog for any reference to this purchase, but I came up empty. That means that this machine (aka Ringo) was bought sometime in 2001, if not earlier, making it over four years old and in need of a replacement.

Ringo is a dell and has treated me very well (bring on the poet line…), so this time I again turned to dell to deliver a quality product. I started searching for the perfect machine before Christmas and finally found it sometime last week. I forced myself to wait a week to see what the next weekly special would be. This week the price went up just a tad on my dream machine and the deals were not much different, so we wasted no time and ordered it.

Okay, it isn’t the best thing ever, but it is a huge upgrade when looking at what I have now. Ringo is somewhere in the range of 1.3 GHz with 256 MB RAM, and a huge conventional CRT monitor that takes up the entire desk. It has two hard drives in it, an 80 GB and a 40 GB (the original), which are almost full, mostly with my recorded shows.

This new machine is 2.8 GHz with 512 MB RAM and a huge 180 GB hard drive. I think my favorite part is the 17 inch flat panel monitor! Oh yeah, I will also have a CD/DVD burner to play with, so hopefully my mom can teach me how she makes all of her DVDs. I can’t wait until it gets delivered!

This means that I will once again be transforming Ringo into my web and ftp server. The machine I borrowed from Phil (aka Skinnyboy) cannot handle the update to edpaffjr.com that I’ve been working on. I haven’t tested the new site out on Ringo yet, but I’m hoping that after I wipe the main drive clean it will perform much better. We’ll see. That leaves Skinnyboy open to serve some other purpose which has yet to be determined.

With all of this news I’m happy to announce the first ever Name Ed’s Computer competition. Just leave a comment to this post and the winner will receive a special, yet to be determined, gift. If you need a little help getting started, let me explain the other computers’ names. Ringo was an old nickname of yours truly while in high school. Skinnyboy was changed from Fatboy, the name Phil had originally given it. Best of luck!