Took me a bit of saving and finding a really awesome deal for a smoking hot Dell system on QVC one night, I'm finally getting back in the land of the WWW!!
Got me a DVD burner for Christmas and about late Feb I decide to finally break down and install it.
Break open the case and did the install. With the case open I fire things back up to check out the install before closing it back up. System's up and running and things look good, UNTIL...
(Note to self and all others---Never leave a glass of liquid on shelf above an open computer!!)
I reach to get a sip of Diet Coke (honest, that's all it was!!
) and when I set it back down I set it on the power cord to my printer, which is also on the shelf. It was like slow motion as I watched it tip over and about a half a glass of Diet Coke dumped right into the middle of my desk splattering all inside the open (plugged in and running!!) computer!! Live motherboards, power supplies, hard drives, video cards, .... do NOT play well with Diet Coke!!
Crackle!!, A little bit of smoke, monitor goes black, and a loud (insert profanity here) as the system goes to meet the great beyond!!
I will not deny there was a bit of tear shedding going on as I sat in disbelief that night knowing there was no way to replace it any time soon!!
My saving grace was that my sister & bro-in-law had gave me an external hard drive for Christmas and I had already moved all my art files, music, downloaded programs & other important documents to it. The only thing left on the onboard hard drive was my programs & operating system (XP Pro).
I had a little over a $1000 saved up to go toward a new system. Doing graphic work, I couldn't just settle on basic system, I needed something with a bit more power. A few weeks ago I was watching the Dell computer show on QVC. As soon as it came on they offered an awesome system for the Special of the Day replacement since they had already sold out of whatever the Special of the Day was. Other than having Windows Vista Premium instead of Windows XP Pro (which is what I wanted) it definately fit the bill for what I was looking for!!
I couldn't dial the phone fast enough!!
It FINALLY showed up last week and wouldn't you know it... we had to go out of town for the weekend. When we got back in Sunday night, I was up until 2AM getting it set up and running. Still have to load all of my graphics programs, but things are finally getting back to normal now.
How's this for a smoking system...(Here's the listed specs)
2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 processor
19" diagonal widescreen flat panel monitor
6GB dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM
640GB SATA hard drive (plus the 500GB external I got for Christmas)
16X DVD+/-RW drive
Dell 2GB DataSafe online backup/storage for one year
Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100
Integrated Sound Blaster Audigy HD software edition
Dell AX210 2.0 speakers
56K modem
10/100/1000 gigabit ethernet
Dell wireless keyboard
Dell optical mouse
1-year PC Tune-Up
19-in-1 card reader: SD, SDIO, SDHS, SDHD, MMC, MS, MS Pro, MS Duo Pro, xD Picture Card
Eight USB 2.0 ports
HDMI, IEEE 1394, VGA ports
Audio line-in/line-out jacks
Headphone/microphone jacks
PCI slots
Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium, SP1
MS Works Plus 2008
15 months of McAfee Security Center
Not sure how well I like the Vista OS though
Definately taking some getting used to. 
Can't wait to get my graphics programs loaded in this weekend to see how much better they are going to work with all that extra RAM & faster processer. My old system only had 1 gig of RAM and "who knows" what processor! It was sufficient, but there was many a time I was sitting twittling my fingers waiting for it to process things to catch up to what I was trying to make it do.
-D-
