Nice Package!

Yes, a very nice package indeed arrived for us Monday night (an excellent Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day gift): a new computer!

Over the phone, my wonderful sisters helped me through all the decisions required to customize and order a computer ("Do you want it to do this? How about that? Do you need this?"). We ended up getting one from Dell. It is a Dell XPS 410 with Intel Core Duo 2 processor and Microsoft Windows XP Professional. I don't really know what all that means, but I can say that it is more compact, prettier, and faster than our other two computers. We can use it to watch DVDs, listen to music, use the Internet with fast loads of every page, and write documents for home or work.

The equipment was cold from traveling in a delivery truck Monday, so I let it sit overnight to warm to room temperature. I had too strong a headache Tuesday to deal with it; we had dinner guests Wednesday night; and Susan and I had a date to watch NBC's Thursday night sitcom lineup. Thus, it waited patiently for me until last night. It's now all set up and working like a charm.

Our oldest computer's monitor is shot: it shows everything in approximately three shades of dim blue, making it an eye strain to use. So I hooked up our second-oldest computer's monitor to it last night so that we can see to move documents from the oldest computer to the newest one. Then I will complete the trade of the second-oldest one for the oldest one, which will go out the door. The girls will use the second-oldest one (just a few years old, actually) in their computer desk downstairs in their homework area. They don't yet have much use of a computer for school work, so they shouldn't mind that it runs more slowly than our new one.

This is the first computer I've bought (the others were gifts) since I bought myself a Tandy computer at Radio Shack for college. My, how things have changed in just a few years. (Yes, I'm implying that it has been just a few years since I went to college, thank you very much.)