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I finally got around to replacing my home PC last week after much procrastinating on my part.  I had hemmed and hawed about getting a new desktop, partly on account of money and on the need for one with my laptop.  I finally decided to bite the bullet again since I missed having a desktop to work on for stretches in my home office.  I also wanted to have a machine in the house running Windows XP to run some applications that just will not run on Windows Vista.

I decided to order another desktop from Dell, and here are the specs of the machine:

• Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6550 (2.33GHz, 1333FSB 4MB L2)
• 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz, Dual Channel DT
• Dell 20 inch Wide E207WFP Analog Flat Panel Monitor
• 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT 2DVI
• 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive 7200RPM, 8MB Cache
• 48x Combo Drive
• 16x DVD+/-RW Drive

With the time I spent home working remotely this weekend, I was able to build my machine the way I wanted it.  I plan on buying some more RAM from Crucial, simply because getting up to 3 GB of memory in this machine is so much cheaper than getting the machine to ship with it.

Finally, I want to get back to gaming on my PC again.  The one thing that you will never be able to do on most laptops is play a FPS-style of game.   I have a fairly decent graphics card, so I am trying to figure out what games to acquire.  To date myself, I haven’t played any decent games since Medal of Honor:Allied Assault, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Doom 3.  Of the three, MOHAA was fun, RtCW was nostalgia (since I played Wolfenstein 3-D in college), and D3 was somewhat tedious but visually good.

As for my laptop, I was thinking what to do with it.  I have an older laptop running Linux I can use around the house when I am lazy.  All it really needs is a PCMCIA wireless adapter, and it is good to go.  I am probably going to give my laptop to my nephew as an early gift of sorts from the family.  He gets something he can use for a while through high school and possibly college.  I just need to make sure he knows to take care of it and to not “show it off.”  I think it will be a good thing to get a laptop in his hands, even if it is much earlier than I ever did.