Technology update

My cell phone was broken.  Well, more accurately, the screen was cracked.  I could still send and receive calls – but I couldn’t read the screen.  So, it was time for a phone upgrade.

I am now sporting a brand spanking new Palm Pre – Sprint’s answer to the iPhone.  Now, I’m not going to get pulled into an iPhone vs Palm Pre debate.  For all of you iPhone owners – I concede that your iPhone is awesome and that you exude awesomeness for owning one.  But, my Palm Pre is still pretty nifty groovy.  I also don’t want to get pulled into a Sprint vs ??? debate.  Sprint meets our needs, gets good coverage where we live, and most of our family and friends are on it.

Now, is it just me – or is that Palm Pre spokes lady in the TV commercials kinda creepy?

In other news, a week or so ago I posted about my computer crashing.  Well, I ordered a new motherboard, CPU, and memory from newegg.com which arrived Tuesday.  I’ve spent the last couple of days putting it all together and reloading the O/S and applications.

My rule of thumb is to not upgrade my computer unless I can, at least, double the computing power.  With that, I offer

	Old	New
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 X2	AMD Phenom II X4
CPU cores	2	4
CPU speed	1.66 GHz	3.0 Ghz
Memory	4 Gig DDR	8 Gig DDR2
Memory speed	400 Mhz	1066 Mhz
Boot drive	80 Gig PATA	64 Gig Solid State
Data drives	2 x 300 Gig SATA	2 x 300 Gig SATA
O/S	Windows Vista 32-bit	Windows 7 RC 64-bit

I could have gone with DDR3 memory; but, that would have required a AM3 socket motherboard and CPU – which all costs more and would have added about $150 to the price.  I could also setup the two 300 Gig drives in a RAID array … well, let’s just say I have my reasons for not doing that.

So, it’s not the fastest available – but it’s still pretty sweet.  Once it completes the bios post, windows boots in about 5 seconds.  Once I enter my password I’m ready to go in less than 10 seconds.  Truthfully, I was hoping for even faster – but I’ll take whatever performance boost I can get.  No noticeable difference in web browsing, word processing, etc – other than the apps load faster; but, my image editing software (Nikon Capture NX2 and PhotoShop Elements 7) is much more responsive. 

Now what to do with the old motherboard.  I’ve amassed quite a collection of motherboards and other old computer parts.  I know Best Buy will take old computers (for $10, but they give you a $10 gift card); but, I don’t know if they’ll take old computer parts.  And, we’re not supposed to put that sort of junk in our trash