New PC

Late last month we finally got a new PC. We had been using my friend's Pentium 933 PC for the past year but I finally bit the bullet and decided to get a new PC to serve as the foundation of our digital media. We ended up getting an eMachines T6524 from Best Buy. I had some gift cards that I used towards the purchase and I also used a 10% off coupon. Combined with the additional $50 manufacturer's rebate, our total out of pocket cost for the new PC came out to only $379!

This new PC met all my pre-defined criteria that I wanted. First, it is an Athlon64. So, it would be able to run future 64-bit applications such as Windows Vista. Second, it had 1 GB of RAM (upgradeable to 4 GB). Third, it has a 200 GB hard disk drive, enough space for all our pictures, videos, and music. Fourth, it has a PCI-Express slot, meaning that I can add a dedicated discrete video card later. Last, but certainly not least, it came pre-installed with Microsoft's Windows Media Center OS, which, as I mentioned in my previous post, was critical for us to be able to stream our media across the network to the Xbox.

In the future (when Windows Vista is released), I will add another gigabyte of memory, probably another 250 GB of storage, and a 256 MB video card.