A traumatic day

Finally, I've transferred operations to my new DELL Vostro 430 and shutdown my trusty Dimension 4550.

It's all to do with decorating! The big desk had to go so that we could paint the rest of the room. The small table can be moved around, so the Dimmension 4550 under the big desk had to be removed and the smaller Vostro 430 could take over email, web browsing, photos and bookkeeping duties.

All the documents, music, photos and favourites were transferred. Emails were a problem as there was no real equivalent to Outlook Express in Windows 7. Hence an Outlook XP database was created on the old system and then imported to Outlook 2003 on the new system and then will be upgraded to Outlook 2010 when it is available later this year. Shame on Microsoft for not creating an easier path to transfer an Outlook Express email database, address book and email account settings directly into the new Windows 7. Anyway it is about time that I upgraded to the real Outlook!

What a difference in performance! Everything is immediately responsive again. Four cores rule!

Old 4550 being retired

My old DELL Dimension 4550 is just about to be retired! I've already received its replacement, a brand new Vostro 430 i5-750 with 3Gb RAM and Windows 7, I'm just waiting for my office to be redecorated and the new desks installed. Yes, I paid Intel's £100 premium for a future-proofed i5-750 processor.

The 4550 was purchased on 25th February 2003 then upgraded to 1Gb RAM and a couple of 160Gb hard disk drives a couple of years ago, but it just doesn't seem responsive any more and multitasking with the old Pentium 4 2.53GHz is not really possible. So the DDR RAM will be used for spares along with everything else in the quirky old case.

I'll be sorry to see it go. Seven years is a long time in computers. Many a character has been typed and many a word read on it.