The New Computer

So, one of the things Miss Tessmacher and I decided we needed was a new computer.  We'd been dealing with a nearly-8-year-old Mac desktop of what I always called the "half-basketball" variety since early 2003…

and it had really hit its last legs, oh, probably about a year ago.  It had a 75 gig hard drive, which seemed so comically monumental in 2003 that I uttered the cursed phrase of computer users everywhere:  "God, why is it so BIG, I'll NEVER fill it!"  Since about 2006, of course, I've been moving lots of little-used song files, photos, and other big memory-eaters onto the Lacie hard drive, but by early this winter it had become depressingly apparent that even with all of that - and a Spring Cleaning thrown in to boot! - the computer just wasn't makin' it anymore.  I was going to wait until the END of the summer to take the plunge with a new machine, but it turned out we had the dough in the bank so we just decided to go for it.  Here's our new machine:

Notice how nice & clean the desk is?  (I actually had to take it apart and rebuild it, as it had swayed & the back fell out.)  Needless to say, it doesn't look like that anymore.

Now, when I'm working in Finale, instead of trying to enter a note, getting the little color spinny wheel, then the note appears, then click to enter another note, color spinny wheel, etc., I click and enter notes as fast as I want.  It has a ridiculous amount of memory again:  almost 600 gigs, which I'll NEVER use in a million years!  Uh…remind me of that in 6 or 7 years, okay? It runs at 2.93 GHz, making it almost twice as fast as the old machine.  The screen, at 24", rivals the size of our television.  And, the keyboard is this tiny little thing…I actually ordered a new one, 'cause I really use the numeric keypad when I'm entering grades.

All in all, it's a great machine, and we're loving it.  And now, with the Time Machine function, I'll never have to shift stuff over by hand in order to transfer to the NEXT new machine!  So, we're good to go.  Yay us!