A Pleasing Hum

A hard disk that develops a whine is a disconcerting thing. Mine has progressively been rising up the decibel scale and has reached the stage where the noise had to be interpreted as a plea for renewal.

When I think about it, my trusty Dell has given good service these past four years, despite the rigours of a country relocation and numerous other house shifts around Auckland before that.

It is interesting to reflect how 'state of the art' four years ago is now consigned to the dustbin of history with new computers quadrupling their performance and capacity in the intervening years.

The upshot of all this was a trip yesterday to the Dell shop on the second level of SunTec City shopping mall where a charming sales person relieved me of $S1,700 and promised delivery of my new system within five to seven days.

They are able to meet these deadlines as Dell is manufactured to order in neighbouring Malaysia.

I have chosen a Dell Optiplex 760 Minitower a small business model of PC very similar in specification to that installed at the National University of Singapore during my time there.

Over Xmas I will have the unenviable task of reinstalling all the programmes that I use and hooking back up to Singtel.

Once thing that is obvious at the moment is the probability of striking some very good deals at the moment in Singapore and this I did with my PC purchase. With the economic situation as it is, the retailers are pacing nervously outside of their outlets and with a bit of bargaining it is possible to get more for less.

No doubt had I waited until 2009 to replace the equipment I could have got the computer even cheaper. However this was a case of "needs must" and I could not wait any longer.

I should also mention the beauty of the range of external hard drives now available. I am using one that stores 550 gigabytes of data more than enough to store my entire digital life including an entire music collection and several years worth of photography.

After cementing a beautiful relationship with Dell we walked across the second level foot bridge to Marina Square complex for lunch at The Coffee Club. Here again the crowds such as they were, were window shopping with few couples actually buying.