The Only Computer I'll Ever Need, For Now Jeff Davis | Vent Section Manager 3/01/02 For two years I had a trusty Gateway SOLO 9150SE laptop. When I got it in 1999 it had a six-gig hard drive, a 333 Mhz Pentium II processor and 96 megabytes of random access memory. I installed all kinds of things on there: AIM, ICQ, Photoshop, Office 2000 Premium and of course Napster, Scour Exchange and any other mp3 piracy tool one could get his hands on. I took programs off and added others. I was fooling myself to think the little guy would make it through this semester. A few months or so I started to get crashes daily. I knew 98 was pretty shoddy to begin with but it never did that when I used it at other consoles. I came to realize, slowly but surely, that my portable pal had become so obsolete it couldn't handle even e-mail. I hate shopping for anything. Shoes, cars, toothbrushes, anything. The only reason this was painless was because I already knew that Dell users almost always have trouble-free systems. I had eliminated the research element and I was grateful for that. I talked with our beloved geek Kevin Martin and he looked me straight in the eyes and said, "Dell Dimension 8200." He grinned deviously and said, "they rock." He made a list of options I had to get as well…things I had no idea existed yet. Of course, I shouldn't have been too taken aback. Kevin could probably tell you where to find the most up-to-date version "beta version" no less of Dig-Dug. He also knew what would be ahead of its time. New technologies come out every day and its hard to keep your finger on certain pulses. One second you think you have the best in the neighborhood but when you pull into the driveway you're a laughingstock of primitiveness. Now, a few thousand dollars later, I have an 8200 with a 120-gigabyte hard drive, 512 megabytes of RAM, a 2.2 Ghz Pentium 4 processor, Zip drive, 16x CD-RW drive, GEForce3 video card, a 17" digital flat-screen monitor and a harmon/kardon speaker system. Some of my friends don't give a flip about computers and they were the ones weeping the most when I pulled this black beauty out of the Styrofoam. My roommate Shaun has a pretty respectable machine that few can match but I've pretty much usurped his throne at the apartment. The only insecurity was the instability of Windows XP Professional. A quick download from Windows Update solved that. My next install will be a firewall from BlackICE. I don't want some wanna-be hacker using my computer to pull off all kinds of nasty crime. If you're on a LAN and your computer is usually on, I strongly suggest you fork over the forty smackers. You can't know if you're being hacked unless a firewall tells you. By that point, the hacker has already been foiled. This should last me all the way through graduate school. ::knock on wood::