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Yeah, I suppose buying the new furnace makes sense, as you gotta keep yourselves and the critters warm....
Well, technically, we only need to replace the a/c -- it's what blew in August; the furnace still works. (And we don't "need" to replace the a/c if you want to get all Maslow's hierarchy about it -- we can survive without a/c.) But when the a/c blew, we decided to replace the whole furnace/air conditioner unit, since the furnace is 15-20 years old. It would be nuts to put in a new a/c and leave the old furnace in.
The greater energy efficiency will be nice, but yikes, it's still a lot of dough.
Also, tell The Boy if he has anything he wants printed in 3-D, I'll see what I can do.
Hmmm. That might lead to a flurry of responses, so I'll have to decide whether to reveal your impending Maker-tasticness to him or not.
Dana, FWIW, I've been very happy with my 3yo HP Pavilion Media Center, which aside from some failures of the video card (it's a high-end gaming/3D card that wasn't high-end enough, and was replaced by a more expensive card with its own built-in cooling fan).
One result of the way this desktop was configured: I'm the only person I know who doesn't curse Vista every day of its use. I think that's because with the extra RAM and heavy-duty graphics oomph, the OS isn't asking for more than the engines can give.
Though I like 7 better, I have to admit neither Vista machine I had ever seemed to have much of a problem.
I've gathered that Vista's biggest problem is that you either need a metric ton of memory and disk space or else you're very sorry you have it. And it's something you don't ever want to put on a laptop.
I've held off upgrading my desktop computer to 7, both because I'm cheap and also because I'd have to worry about programs breaking or needing to be reinstalled, adjusted, and so on.
Yeah, this is for my mom, and she is not building a machine nor am I building one for her.
My family has the Sony Vaio at home. It seems fine.
I had a Toshiba laptop with 2GB of memory and Vista ran/runs just fine.
I don't think there would be much trouble going from Vista to Windows 7, they aren't much different though 7 has plenty of refinements. But I don't think I'd upgrade either.
A year ago we got all new computers at work, and for the first time we hired outside consultants to set everything up. They strongly discouraged us from having Vista installed, so we got the workstations with XP. They said if their clients insisted on Vista, they would charge twice as much for support than they would for XP.
So far my bosses have made no noises of switching to 7.
I'm the only person I know who doesn't curse Vista every day of its use.
You know, I've never had a problem with Vista. I'm not a superuser or anything but both of my machines with it have been trouble-free.
I have Vista on my laptop and am fine with it.
as a mac user, I have a win7 Compaq laptop. It's a single core processor. It works just fine. It's almost like MacOS-lite. Some frustrating things every once in awhile, but nothing like 95 days. I think its a better interface than XP. Mind you, 90% of what I do on it is e-mail and cruising the internet. Occasionally I try to stream a video to my xbox. It has moderate success with that. But I blame the single core processor on that.
- * reason for getting win laptop instead of mac? Price. This little puppy was on sale for $300 at Best Buy. I was looking to replace my iPod for travel. $50 more, and got a full computer. I got it in February (I think).
