new toys

Last week my old and dependable 19″ CRT started showing everything white as yellow. I can’t complain, as I only paid $50 for it in 2001, when my company was downsizing and the monitor had to be at least four years old at that time.

I read on the net that if you whack the CRT hard on the side, it might clear up for a bit, and indeed that did work for most of last week. But on Friday afternoon, it went yellow and stayed yellow, as if someone had put a yellow gel on the screen (or as if someone had peed all over the screen).

So, I dipped into savings a bit and splurged for a Viewsonic 20″ widescreen LCD monitor and installed it this weekend. I have to say that I really, really love it. The image is beautiful and the widescreen is wonderful. I can open all kinds of windows and see everything at once. This puppy runs at 1680×1050. Very nice.

I was so excited about the new LCD monitor that I took a long, hard look at my ageing PC: an old, but sturdy PIII that my brother had scavenged for me from his office, where he is an IT manager and had been told to get rid of all the PIIIs. My Dad and my niece also have nice PIIIs. It only has 256 mb of RAM, and can only go up to 512 MB.  As an impatient multi-tasker, I often ran into issues waiting for programs to open.

I took a gander at the Dell Outlet store and found a very nice machine with 2 GB of RAM, Intel Dual Core, a nice NVIDIA graphics card, and a hunky hard drive. It should arrive next week.  I got a great price on it and free shipping due to a special they were running. Couldn’t be happier. I have a screaming PC and a hot monitor for less than $1000, and I’m really, really happy in a geeky kind of way.