For the last ten months I’ve been working solely on my Acer Aspire 9500 laptop, which had replaced my Compaq Presario 900US. The wide 17″ screen of my current laptop was excellent for working on all day, as well as when I had to demo projects for clients. However, the 512MB of ram, the limited Celeron processor, and the 80GB drive just isn’t enough anymore. Working became difficult when I had a ton of apps open at once - both processor time and screen real estate dwindled.

Playing a video game during lunch was essentially impossible.

So, I’ve finally got myself an upgrade. After spending a month or so checking out various prices, I finally went with a customized HP Pavilion d4790y. Because I customized it I got an HP 19″ wide LCD monitor for $100. I bought a second 19″ LCD monitor that was on sale at NewEgg.com (Acer AL1917WAbd 19″).

Here are the specs of my custom work machine:

• Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo processor E6400 ( 2.13GHz )
• 2GB DDR2-667MHz dual channel SDRAM (2×1024)
• 320GB 7200 rpm SATA hard drive
• LightScribe 16X DVD+/-R/RW SuperMulti drive
• 15-in-1 memory card reader, 3 USB, 1394, audio
• 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT, HD , TV-out, 2 DVI
• Integrated 7.1 channel sound w/front audio ports

I down-graded the system to Windows XP, SP2 because many of apps have no or little support for Vista. I’ll have some pics soon .