Santa Claus

I bought a new toy today, although I’ll only get to play with it for a couple of days.

My parents, both approaching seventy, decided they want to check out the internet, so for Christmas I bought them an Asus Eeebox.

The minidesktop comes with a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 160 Gb disk, a gigabyte of RAM, and XP, yet cost me less than €300 including VAT.

Since it doesn’t come with a monitor, it gave me an excuse to upgrade to a larger computer screen, handing over the old model to my parents.

Moore’s Law struck me once again as I tried out the new box, and compared the spec to my own venerable desktop. My desktop came with 256Mb RAM (recently upgraded to 1Gb), and it’s hard drive is half the size of the Eeebox.

On the other hand, the Eeebox comes without a DVD, so at some point I may have to but my parents a USB accessory, depending on how their computer use evolves.

And in case you’re wondering, I went with XP instead of Linux because the nephew next door knows how to fix Windows, whereas I’m 200 miles away if anything goes wrong.

By Gerard Cunningham

Gerard Cunningham occupies his time working as a journalist, writer, sub-editor, blogger and podcaster, yet still finds himself underemployed.