To Upgrade or Buy: (continued) We then discussed their wish to buy a scanner. The newest scanners come with USB connections. Why not add USB card so when they get the inevitable digital camera they'll have a port for it? Then we talked about backup. Even their small hard drive with plenty of space on it would use hundreds of floppy disks to back up. They were too new at computering to talk about specific data backups on just a few floppies, so we discussed a handy CD-Writer. Of course, I said, you don't need such a thing unless you're planning to download music files or create large digital image collections. Oh! Yes, they were VERY interested in both of those, but especially music.
Now we add $250 for the CD-Writer, $100 for the scanner, and the tech fee covers the modem, Norton, a USB card and new hardware configuration. We're over $500 for the upgrade. Of course this will only last 6 months to a year because they'll soon be expert enough to realize that music and graphics need more power and ram.
We jumped on to the Dell web site. Whether this is the most computer for the money I'm not sure. I do know the site is fun to shop. So long story short, R & M have a brand new fabulous Pentium III Dell! We cleaned up the old one and donated it to the AARP. And that's the end of that happy shopping story and the beginning of a new year of music, photo and Internet fun .. with a little learning curve of course!
December 18th, 2000: I got to pay a house call to the new Dell Dimension L800. Dell threw in a Umax scanner. What fun! We downloaded music MP3 files from Napster and practiced making a CD of them.