My parents are now the proud owners of a new Packard Bell desktop machine. It’s pretty good – AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD, DVD rewriter, 64MB onboard graphics (since I doubt my parents will be playing Doom 3 any time soon), TV tuner card and multi-function card reader, plus the usual Ethernet, 56k modem, keyboard, mouse and related gubbins. There’s also a 17″ TFT monitor with built-in speakers that looks very nice and occupies much less space on the desktop. The whole setup is a rather fetching black and silver colour – much better than the beige boxes we used to have.
It comes with Norton Internet Security Suite 2004, but it’s only got 90 days of free updates, after which it’ll presumably demand payment of us, so I’m replacing that with the standard firewall in XP SP2 (which we had to install) and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise which is decidedly less annoying.
In fact about the only thing it doesn’t have is a floppy drive, which I suppose is a sign of the times.
