Traveling Thoughts

It’s easy to be done Christmas shopping when I only had to buy for one person. Dad’s going to be completely shocked. The whole monthly wine club thing didn’t work out, because, come to find out from my mom, they’re extremely picky with what wines they’ll drink. So I’m glad I didn’t jump in head first with that one.

I got wind about a couple months ago about his intents to save up for a computer so that he could plug in his special photography printer that will print from negatives and slides and whatnot and start printing up his photos. He’s had this printer for almost a year I’d like to say, and it hasn’t even come out of the box because he hasn’t got a computer to hook it up to.

He had been telling mom that he could get one for under $500 and I kindof frowned upon that because he wouldn’t be getting the greatest computer, so I decided that I’d get him a computer for Christmas, a good one. And it definitely wasn’t going to be under $500. In fact, when I got done building his computer online at the dell website, it was a $1000 computer. He’s going to be so amazed, I can’t wait to see the look on his face Christmas morning. I’m so excited that I’m having problems keeping my mouth shut. He thinks he’s getting some sweaters from Cabela’s because we had a $50 minimum for our person, and our person had to turn in a list.

So, the computer isn’t as good as I would’ve like to have gotten him, but I didn’t have $1700 to pour into an Apple either. So he ended up with an Inspiron 530, with an Intel Core2 Duo processor E4500 (2.20GHz ,800FSB) w/Dual Core Technology and 2MB cache
2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz (I figured I could upgrade his RAM later if need be, and we’ll probably need to, but I didn’t feel like paying $400 for twice that much RAM)
Dell 19 inch E198WFP Flat Panel Analog and Digital (I really would’ve like to get him a bigger screen, and a widescreen at that, but I don’t know what’s going to be best for viewing his photos and true colors, so I took the default because he may go buy an expensive but perfect for his needs monitor)
128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8300GS (I would’ve like a 256MB gfx card, but the other option was an AMD product and being raised by Intel that’s unacceptable)
320GB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive (7200RPM) (In the end it’s not going to be big enough for his photo files, but he can save for a terabyte external drive)
16X DVD+/-RW Drive (just in case he decides he needs to back up his files somewhere else than an external drive that he doesn’t have yet)
Dell 19-in-1 Media Card Reader (he hasn’t gone digital yet, but you just never know if/when he will so I was prepared)
Windows XP (because I know his printer software will run on it but I wasn’t so sure if it’d run on vista, so i took the safe route)

I really hope he’s as excited with this as I am. And I really hope that for the sake of me, other’s are jealous and go ape shit over the fact that I spent 20x more than the minimum that we were supposed to spend, because that would really ruin my day. And actually, truthfully, I didn’t spend 1k on the computer, I had a coupon thanks to spoofee that brought the price down by $350.