computer upgrade plan

So I’ve finally given in and admitted to myself that a portion of our tax refund this year is going to upgrade my desktop computer.

I’m still not entirely thrilled about the idea just because we’re trying to focus so much on debt reduction this year and it’s a decent chunk of money, but I can’t keep piggy-backing off of Sara’s laptop forever and there are some things that I’ve had a really tough time doing on it anyways. I mean, I can write just fine and I’ve also managed to limp through a small amount of photo editing and website updates, but it’s nothing compared to being able to sit at my desk and have everything where I need/expect it. Aside from last week’s tagging work, I’ve been putting a lot of web development for my other upcoming site on hold just because it’s such a pain to do on a smaller machine.

So anyways, I’ve decided to take somewhat of a two-phased approach to this to help conserve both money and my own sanity. The plan is to now buy a new motherboard, CPU, memory, and that’s it. When these arrive, I’m just going to drop them into my existing case with my current hard drive, power supply, and CD-ROM drives, and pray that the existing install of XP doesn’t freak over the massive hardware changes. This will get me back on the road again and give me a healthy performance boost to boot, and then later on this summer when we’ve got a little spare money and I’m not as pressed for time, I’ll go ahead and drop another block of memory into the thing, new video card, a copy of Vista 64-bit, and go through the whole re-install process all over again.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – I’d love to just do everything now and have a kick ass new machine to work off of, but finances aside, I realized today that I don’t think I even have Vista-compatible versions of some of my software and I really need them to do either website work or put together the books I’m getting ready to start. I’d hate to spend a weekend or two upgrading, only to find that I’m boned because my software doesn’t like Vista. I’ll still figure it out eventually and do something with it because I do want to upgrade to 64-bit to take advantage of the extra RAM, but it’s just not something I feel like dealing with right now!

And of course, on top of all that, as previously mentioned on Twitter I also need to replace my iPod because apparently repair isn’t an option, but that’s going to have to wait until after we get Sara’s car fixed to see if there’s any money leftover. Boy, that sure went quick, and we don’t even have it yet… :O