Out with the old, in with the New....kind of...

Well, ol' reliable HP 2Ghz P4 is in its waning days. With Win XP and all current updates installed, it is just enough of a burden now to bog it down while running more than two or three apps...even with 1G of RAM. It also has a USB problem. The wall wart from a cheapo powered USB Hub I bought fragged the power distribution on USB ports on the mother board; causing them to not work quite right when using anything that is not self powered (flash drives, etc). USB ports on an external card work fine, so everything does technically work...but you know its time is coming. With tax time approaching the first week of April is not the time to find out you need a new machine.
This has been a good machine; 5 years with multiple upgrades. It started out with a 120 gig HD, 512M RAM, CD/DVD +R/RW , zip 100, and floppy drive, and a 64M Geoforce AGP card.
It now has: A 250gig 7200rpm HD, 1gig RAM, dual +/- CD/DVD R/RW 16X burners, a 19 in 1 card reader, 5 additional USB 2.0 ports, 128M AGP video card (ATI 9200 series), Sound Blaster Live card, newer (PS2) Keyboard and monitor. We actually wore the labels off the original keyboard (which was excellent) as well as the home key nubs (first time we've ever done that).
It originally came with a 15" LCD which we passed along through the family and then to a friend, it was replaced with a 19" LCD that will be used with the new box....speaking of which...


The new machine is a Dell Inspiron 530 : Core Duo 4500, 2 gig RAM, 320gig 7200rpm SATA HD, 24x +/- CD/DVD R/RW burner, 128M PCI-e nVidia card, 19 in 1 card reader, 8 USB ports (split between the front and back), with integrated sound. The Mrs. has a employee purchase deal going with her work which gets us this box for under $600, which is about a third of what we paid for the HP 5 years ago. The Dell box is lacking in a few areas, but that is readily rectified by transferring one of the burners, and the Sound Blaster and Firewire cards from the HP to the new box, as well as the HP's hard drive with all its years of data (which is backed up, but it's nice to have it a click away in explorer right on the machine).

One thing that won't change on the box is the operating system, it'll still be Windows XP.

Why? you ask?

Because the Mrs needs to run 7 years previous versions of her tax software, and Vista will not run the 2000-2003 version of her package (well, it might run on it, it's just not "certified" to run on it. She's upgraded to a professional version for the last three years that do run on Vista, but she has to be backward compatible for her customers. We also have a couple applications that we use that will not run under Vista properly (Super Mp3 Recorder Professional, custom invoice app, EZ Video capture, etc...).

Vista is nice, and would run nicely on this box, but for our practical usage, XP will likely run just as fast (if not faster) on this box than Vista ....for some time to come. I know Vista well enough to know that (IMO) for our usage, there are no must-have features in Vista that I can't find comparable (free) tools to do the same thing under XP. No real gaming will ever happen on this machine so running the latest version of DirectX means nothing to us. We may use Dual-Monitor support at some time in the future, but at this point, XP handles that better than Vista (using different type video cards and XPDM as opposed to WDDM which require the same hardware/driver). About the only irk I have about NOT getting Vista is that Network permissions, connections, and usage are faster, more reliable, and (dare I say it?) easier to tweak in Vista, even in the Home premium edition (which earns a big Kudos from me to Microsoft). Power management and Standby/hibernation also "works" in Vista, but since this box is a desktop, that doesn't come into the equation.

Kudos to Dell for continuing to supply machines with XP for those who want them.

The Mrs. has a rule on technology, if something new comes in, something old must go. So the HP will be trimmed as mentioned above, and shipped out to my Mom who is still using a 500Mhz Celeron with 256M of memory (Win 98SE).