My current computer is been a Pentium 4/2.66Mhz with 1 Gb of RAM (DDR PC2700) having two 80Gb Maxtor 6Y080L0 Hard drives (133 MBps Data Transfer Rate). I bought it almost 7 years ago.

Yesterday, I ordered a Dell Studio XPS. It's certainly not their top of the line gaming system, but it seemed to fall into the best "bang for the buck" class, at least of what they were offering at the moment. A couple times when I was on their Web site the deals seemed to change as I was trying to compare. At one point, I'd decided which one to go for only to see that its price had gone up by over $100 while I was looking at another model.

The one I ordered has an Intel i7-920 [quad core] Processor(8MB L3 Cache, 2.66GHz), 6GB Tri-Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz, a single 640GB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache Hard Drive, and an nVidia GeForce GT 220, 1024MB video card (for an HDMI port). I'll also get a 23-inch Dell monitor, and an upgrade from Vista Home Premium Edition SP1, 64-Bit to Windows 7 when it's released. Other than that, it's pretty much standard -- CD/DVD burner, standard mouse and keyboard ...; bottom line was just over $1100, which is more than I planned on spending, but seemed like a pretty good deal for the specs. I got a 7% discount because my employer has a deal with Dell, with "free" delivery (as if it wasn't built into the price), then 7% went back onto the invoice for sales tax.

I could have gone with a lower-end system, and it still would have been a step up, but if I'm going to spend the time setting everything up on a new computer, I want it to be REALLY worth the effort. I had a slightly better computer that I could have used; it used to be my (off-line) "game" computer, which pushed this one into the role of my "Web browser" computer, but I don't play games anymore. However, it wasn't enough better to motivate me to swap cases and go through getting everything set up how I want it, only to still be working on an "obsolete" computer. Also, my employer has been making noises about wanting us to have the capability to work from home -- they say it's for flu pandemic planning, but I'm afraid it might be more like so they'll have a 24/7 slavery option without having to pay to keep the building open.

The new computer probably won't affect my connection speed, but it should reduce application startup times and run delays so that bandwidth will be my primary bottleneck.