I finally have a new computer. Eherm, let me correct myself: I was finally able to make my new computer work the way it should.

My new "black box" is a Pentium 4 running at 1.7GHz with a 40GB hard drive and 128MB of memory. Okay, so it's not state-of-the-art, but hey, all I wanted was enough hardware power to run Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Microsoft Word simultaneously. I don't even think I'll be using this new box for heavy PC gaming either, since it doesn't have much of high-end graphics capabilities (the graphics and sound cards are integrated into the motherboard).

Most important of all, however, the thing's got a quicker 56K internal modem than our old reliable 33.6K Sportster, and it's not as crash-prone as my old Pentium 2 was. We found out the cause of the irritating 30-minute-per-use crash habit of our old PC, and it's because the cooling systems aren't working well anymore. My dad and I cleaned out the computer of all its dust (I never thought computers could get so dirty on the inside) and had the CPU fan cleaned out too. Pretty soon I'll have to clean out my stuff from the old hard disk as well.

That's fine though. I'm just happy. Now maybe I can get on with my work...