Geeking Out
The new computer arrived Thursday afternoon, February 16th, and I fiddled with it until the wee hours of Friday morning, installing the important things — you know, like Firefox, Outlook/Office and World of Warcraft! 
I picked Mom up Friday morning so she could carpool to Dallas for a miniaturists’ convention, and when I got back home and finished various chores, I ended up crashing to catch up on lost sleep.
So my new computer has felt a little unloved until today, when I finally cracked her case to behold the beauty that is a new CPU. She’s definitely gorgeous inside, with more ventilation than I’ve ever had in a computer (one with the case on, anyway!)
She has already taught me a few things, such as:
- Dell no longer puts a parallel port or a standard keyboard connector on their PCs (XPS-series, anyway), necessitating that I dig up a long USB cable while praising the computer gods that my ancient Epson Stylus Photo 890 is a USB-capable printer; and causing me to buy a new (USB) keyboard at CompUSA: Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.
- The only reason my old IDE drive works in my new Dell XPS 400 is because I went the single CD/DVD combo drive route, so that left one free IDE port and power connector. My misconception was that a Serial ATA-equipped computer was inherently backward compatible to IDE, but that’s not exactly the case. If I want to drop a second IDE drive into my new XPS, I’ll need to get either a PCI IDE controller card or an IDE to SATA converter.
- Also, for a high-end system, the XPS 400 has a marked lack of power connectors — nowhere near enough to power everything if all the open bays were occupied with drives. From a Dell discussion forum thread:
“There’s only two SATA power hook ups - you’d need either IDE drives or adapter plugs or an SATA power splitter. You could install 4 SATA drives easily that way. You could also install an old IDE drive if you only have one CD rom easily enough. Or more IDE drives with an IDE PCI adapter card.”
– user CTskydiver, re: “Maximum number of supported SATA drives” DellTalk thread.
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iGeek, Day 14: Two Weeks Post-Op!
JRF said,
February 21, 2006 @ 10:20 am
Congrats on the new PC!
I used to LOVE the Microsoft Ergonomic keyboards until they started making them with the tiny Function keys and tiny arrow keys.
Is the margin on keyboards so small that they can make more cash-dollars by reducing the size of the keys?
I doubt it is an ergonomic improvement. It lost me as a customer.
Shannon said,
February 21, 2006 @ 11:08 am
You might like the “new” generation of their ergonomic keyboards, then. The Function keys are still slightly stunted (the keys have graduated to full size, but the divot on them allows only about 1/3 the normal surface area for one’s finger), but the arrow keys and such are full-size.
I’m enjoying the new keyboard with the exception of the spacebar — it resists a little more than I think a spacebar should. It may get a little more supple through use.