Shoemaker's Children: Prepare For New Shoes

It's often said the shoemaker's children have no shoes. The phenomenon was proving true for me, so I finally took action.

My main office systems are over four years old. As most all statistics reveal, the costs of supporting a PC beyond four years exceeds the expense of a new computer.

So, the antiquated Sony Vaio Pentium 4 3.2GHz CPU (with an incredible -- at least for the day when it was bought -- 2MB of L2 cache, 1GB of RAM and 100GB hard disk) will be relegated to test system duty, exclusively. In its place will sit a Dell Vostro. Powered by a simple but fast Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz CPU (with 6MB of L2 cache and a 1,333MHz FSB) and 4GB of RAM, I've spec'd the new box out with two disks (one for backup) and a terabyte of storage (to house the dozens of disk images and ISOs I keep on hand for clients).

Next I'll replace my aging laptop. If it didn't get so beat up in the field, I'd be tempted to order an Apple Mac Book Pro. Due to the extensive usage (and subsequent beating) the laptop experiences each day, though, I may opt for a MacBook. But that'll have to wait for another day (the old G4 is still plenty fast).