I've had lots to write about but no time, as I was running around like mad getting our SES San Jose 2005 show going, not to mention keeping things going with all the regular search news for Search Engine Watch. Now that things have slowed from manic to just busy, I'm finally transitioning to a new desktop computer.

My last system is just over two years old, a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. It was fast when I got it, but after two years of crud being dumped on it, it's taken forever to boot, as well as various hangs and other issues.

I could do the reformat and reinstall thing as I've done before, but I also work with three screens and often have five or six different apps open (and in multiple windows). It was time for more power.

In the end, I looked at various processors out there and read various reviews before deciding that the overpriced Pentium Extreme Edition 840 was the way to go. It's a dual processor with hyperthreading or whatever. In the end, it basically acts like I've got four processors in my machine. Or so they say.

It came as part of a Dell XPS 600 setup. I've also got twin Nvidia cards and a RAID drive designed for speed rather than redundancy. I'm all about the speed. There's 2GB of RAM, as well.

Overall, it's a system aimed at gamers -- but it should still work well for my mega multi-tasking. So far, I like! I did find that there bridge between the twin cards had to be disabled if you want to run more than one monitor (each card has four outputs, so you can do up to four monitors). Apparently, the bridge makes both cards run as one super-fast one -- great if I was running a game. I'm not, but nice to know if I ever get back to that. There's both a physical bridge and a software setting one. You can leave the physical bridge on and just disable it via software.

That's the saddest thing. Back those years ago when I couldn't afford a decent machine, I dreamt of having one that was fast or several to play networked games. Today, I've got plenty of machines I could link together and all pretty fast. I just lack the time for fun!

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