Ma & Pa Get a New Computer
Posted on November 1, 2007
3 Comments
At the beginning of the month, I helped my father-in-law pick out a new laptop and then set it up for him. He was way overdue for an upgrade.
My folks have also been a bit overdue. Their work horse has been a PIII 450 with (upgraded) 320MB of RAM for quite a few years. They were out visiting for a few days and I finally convinced them that it was time for change.
After some looking around we settled on an HP desktop (model a6230n). It runs an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core 5600+ (2.8 GHz), 3GB of ram and a 400GB drive. We looked at some cheaper units, but the price differences tended to be negated if we tried to upgrade anything. The onboard video is an nvidia chipset which I liked over the similar models with that intel video. Compared to what they’ve been using, this unit is a Cadillac!
Since I had their old computer sitting next to the new one, this was my first experience using the Belkin Easy Transfer USB cable. It worked great.
On the new (Vista) machine I started up the profile transfer thingy and it guided me through installing the software on the older XP machine. Once that was in place and the cable was hooked up the data was moved over quite quickly. Painless. Granted, I was only moving about 2 GB, but still… it was a non-event. It would’ve been even faster if the old machine was capable of USB2 speeds. Oh well.
Somehow I can’t help but think running the profile transfer made the migration from Outlook Express to Vista’s “new” (to me) Windows Mail application. Until setting up this machine, I wasn’t even aware it existed!
After the moving, I spent about a half-hour uninstalling some of the pre-loaded stuff — primarily the Office trial and anything with “Symantec” in the name (heh, that made it run even faster!). Threw on a copy of AVG Free for anti-virus and boxed it all back up for their trip home.
The old machine had 10GB and 30GB drives, of which there was over 25GB free. I’m curious to see how they utilize their new 400 gigs of storage!
Tags: antivirus, avg, Belkin, Easy-Transfer, HP, symantec, upgrade
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3 Responses to “Ma & Pa Get a New Computer”
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Ma and Pa (for me) would be happy (and still are) with a 512mb RAM 1.8Ghz PC. Why? Well, they don’t use resource heavy programs. They don’t really seem into it as much as a geek like me.
Hell, that’s faster than my wife’s computer!
She’s content too.
But the 450mhz (aka .45 GHz) was just not keeping up with some of the image editing and such.
I heard from my Mom today — she’s loving the new rig.
I guess this new computer would be great for your folks till they reach retirement age ay? On the other side, why vista?