Part 2. Took the day off to pick up the machine. My friendly computer shop guy let me know he’d found a better keyboard/mouse bundle which saved me a few bucks, so the total cost was exactly $1200.

12:25. Just the basics plugged in — monitor, mouse, keyboard. Power it up. Certainly boots into XP fast. “27 days left for activation.”

Fiddle around with the defaults. The shop thoughtfully named the main account after my company name, but I want it to be Daniel… try renaming it, but the Docs & Settings subdirectory won’t rename. MyDocuments can be moved, but not its parent. So eventually I just create a fresh account for myself. Accounts for the kids too — no Administrator privileges for them, oh no.

14:10. Speakers plugged in and working. More playing about with settings (Hello Windows Classic theme). Tested a DVD. All works well though the eject button on the drive isn’t overly responsive. Hooray, the bundled PowerDVD happily grabs frames, something I sometimes want to do. The bundled Nero looks a bit light-on though… will want to be getting a real copy for DVD burning.

That’ll do for now, other stuff to do.

Microsoft announces a bunch of XBox 360 game collaborations and confirms XBox 360 will be compatible with (old) XBox games, though there’s some doubt over how it will be achieved, and evidently it won’t be clean: Microsoft representatives did say they would start with more popular titles such as “Halo,” then move down the line.. Yeuch, sounds messy.

Meanwhile Sony has pulled the covers off the Playstation 3, with what sound like some very impressive performance stats.

Oh, and some mob called Nintendo with a console called Revolution appears to be destined yet again for third place.

(Thanks Tony)

I’ve got a new PC. After the old one died, I’ve been surviving on a single machine for a while, but it was time to have a second one again, if only so both the kids can play games at once while I’m busy on the XBox!

Part 1… the purchase. Well I considered various things…

Notebook or desktop? Notebooks are getting more powerful, and I love the idea of surfing from the couch. But really I need a good, speedy workhorse machine with plenty of connections.

Mac or Windows or Linux? My brother-in-law is a strong Mac advocate, and I love my iPod, but ultimately I wanted to stay in my comfort zone. I’ve used Windows for many years, at work and at home, and I’ll continue to do so for quite some time. And on occasion I need to do work from home, and some of that involves Microsoft proprietary tools (cough, cough) like Visual Basic. So for now it’s gotta be Windows.

Which vendor? I’ve had my share of little companies and of big ones when buying PCs. But over the years I’ve heard from various friends about the good work of Landmark Computers, a medium-sized company here in Melbourne. So I decided to try them.

So I went along last Thursday to their city shop and talked to one of their guys, figured out what I wanted by starting with their “Predator” model, fiddled the config a bit (no monitor as I already had one, no floppy, no modem, 1Gb RAM, XP Pro instead of Home, that kind of thing) and put in the order. I was hoping it’d be ready by Saturday, as it would be very convenient to drive in and get it. They said they couldn’t promise that, so points for honesty.

On Friday they rang to say there was an issue with the graphics card, and if it was okay they’d bump me to a higher model for an extra $25. They also said they’d go for a better case for no extra cost, and that it wouldn’t be ready before Monday. Cool, I replied.

Stand by for part 2…