February 24, 2003
Good lord I need a new computer. This thing is old -- a P2/266 with 128 megs of memory that I bought junior year -- and it's really starting to show. Attempting to run any Counter Strike map besides the midget-sized Iceworld creates too many sprites for this old machine to keep track of. Mozilla takes about 10 seconds to start and can grab all of my system resources if I try to display a large page. Don't get me started on Photoshop 6.
To make matters worse I took a quick trip to Ohio over the weekend to help Mom and Jim with their AOL Broadband connection -- turns out AOL 8 is even more of a memory drain than its predecessors. Now that I've added some more RAM to their machine it stomps mine in every way imaginable (except for the vid-card, but a fat lot of good that does if the rest of the machine's too slow to handle it). I cannot allow my family to have a better computer than I do.
I've been looking at new parts on and off for the last several months. A Pentium 4 or a comparable AMD chip, a DVD-ROM and CD-RW, a gig of RAM. Windows 2000, if I can find it, since I'm tired of 98 and its chronic suicidal tendencies. You know, the basics. Just buying the parts I need, a new computer would be pretty cheap. But it'd still cost money. And there's the problem.
But I think if it this way -- it's just more motivation to find a job. Well, that and the whole "food and shelter" thing.
Update: Hey, kids! Ya know what's fun? Writing about needing an upgrade then waking up to find that the file allocation table's hosed and your computer won't boot! So now I get to drive to CompUSA or someplace similar and buy a new drive, 'cause that one's hosed! Yay!
