My church gave me a Dell Dimension 4300s that they weren't using any more because I am the webmaster for the church website. It had an 18 gig hard drive but had a faster and newer processor and a better video card.
So, I borrowed a external hard drive and copied everything from my old computer onto the drive. I formatted the 80 gig hard drive I had on that machine and put it in the new one. I found my copy of Windows XP and loaded it. So far it's running much better than the other machine ever did. I'm going to take the 18 gig hard drive and use it as a secondary drive.
I also took some ram from the other computer and combined it with the ram on this computer. It now has 512mb of ram. I actually have a bunch of ram cards but the silly Dell people only put two card slots on the 4300s so I can't use those. I'll probably buy two 1gig cards soon.
I've heard lots of horror stories about the Dimension 4300s so I am very hesitant, especially after all the trouble I had with my Inspiron 5150 laptop. But it's working well for now and I have everything backed up.
Since I couldn't find my MS Office CD I decided I didn't really care that much.
I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird as an alternative to Outlook. I like it a lot and it's very similar.
I'm also using Open Office. It's FREE and is nearly exactly like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. It's incredible and did I mention it's free?
I'm going to get a firewire card for video editing and for a firewire external hard drive I have. I'm also going to get a DVD burner for this machine....hopefully a lightscribe. Those things are really cool.
