I just can’t believe how inexpensive computers are these days.  Today I went to the local Fry’s for a motherboard to replace the one in my old Dell Dimension.  Silly me.  Apparently Dell doesn’t use ATX form factor motherboards.  So I had to get a new case as well.  I picked up a case, power supply, motherboard, processor (666 Celeron, $20), RAM (256 MB, $60), and 80 GB hard drive ($90)  for a whopping $315.00.  That includes tax.  I brought it home and scavenged the drives (DVD-ROM, CD burner, 3.5″ diskette) from the old Dell, and I was up and running.  Well, it wasn’t quite that simple.  First I had to put everything together, which is something that I’d sworn off.  Tinkering with the hardware stopped being interesting to me a very long time ago.

People who have had bad experiences with Linux GUIs (slow, clunky, etc.) probably have experienced them on old hardware.  KDE 1.2 was tolerable, just barely, on my old Pentium 200.  KDE 3.0 was painful.  But on my new 666 machine with 256 MB of RAM, the thing is quite nice.  I’m looking forward to getting more familiar with it.  And installing from the DVD?  What a joy, compared to swapping 7 CDs in and out.