New desktop

I was in Walmart (Canada) on Friday and wandered past a pallet load of Dell Inspiron 530 desktop PCs, which included a nice 22" LCD flat panel monitor. They were marked down from $900 to $600. The included 22" LCD flat panel monitor is worth about $300 by itself. 2GB of RAM. 320 GB HDD. But a bottom-of-the-line 1.6GHz dual core processor. 3-year warranty.

When I got home with it, I went to Dell.ca and tried to reproduce it on-line. It was just over $1000 on-line, but that's with a 1.8GHz processor instead of 1.6GHz.

And hey! It even came with everyone's favorite software pre-installed. Symantec's world-famous Norton Internet Security 2007 - a 90-day free trial. So I typed in my product key from my 3-license CD and this time it was accepted no problem. There's no point waiting for the 90-days to expire because the license from the CD expires in about 8 months anyway.

The expiry date is set by the first installation, the next two expire on the same date as the first. I guess it's not really a three license pack is it? It is more like a ONE LICENSE pack that can be used on up to three PCs.

When I ran LiveUpdate, it downloaded about 45MB of updates followed by a mandatory reboot. I ran LiveUpdate again and it download another few MB followed by a mandatory reboot. I ran LiveUpdate again and it download another about 200KB (no reboot). I ran LiveUpdate again and it download just 12KB (no reboot). I ran LiveUpdate again and it download another few hundred KB followed by a mandatory reboot. I ran LiveUpdate again and it download another few MB followed by a mandatory reboot. I ran LiveUpdate again and it download another few hundred KB followed by a mandatory reboot. I ran LiveUpdate again and it finally seemed to be done.

I then rebooted one last time just out of spite.

Back to the new desktop. What a great machine (although perhaps not for hard core gaming). The screen is huge both physically and in terms of resolution (1600 by 1050 pixels). The screen resolution provides a huge amount of space for windows and desktop gadgets. It's really nice to be able to see more of each web page without scrolling around. The system emits a 2-second burst of fan noise at start-up, but then it is basically silent after that. It comes with Vista Home Premium preinstalled and the performance is acceptable. I watched a DVD on it and the picture quality (upscaled to 1600x1050 pixels) was glorious.