For the first time, in a long time, my two work machines are faster than my home PC.

In a long time? I think it's the first time ever. Going back to my schooling days, there's no way they could keep up with my own tinkering and Gadget-Budget at home. In my early career, when I was a wee tester, I was expected to capture benchmarks on "typical user class machines" which translated into underpowered in my mind... I couldn't allow that in my house. After that, I was given whatever type of machine that the company could afford... in some cases, this was an abacus with a slide rule. After I went out west, my fortunes changed: my main machine was new and shiny - hurrah for a new hire - and I recently picked up another make-me-happy machine for my desk, this one being a doublewide [64-bit].

Yet the home machine lags... a non-HT P4 at 2.53GHz. I think. I don't even remember, which is sorta sad - it's definitely somewhere in the mid 2GHz range. I haven't upgraded the thing in at least 18 months. Maybe 24 months... I usually upgrade Video/CPU/Motherboard/RAM all at once and then repave the box... yet I haven't done this in nearly two years. What's up with that? Am I getting old? Cheaper? Pft!

I think it's a combination of a few things... one is all the hype over the BIOS-less machines that I've kept a 1/4 of an eye on. Also Serial-ATA, the new CPU socket (775, I think?), 64-bit from AMD, RAMBUS++/2 (or whatever), and PCI-Express... a while ago, I heard that all of that crap was coming down the pipe. I thought it was supposed to hit at the end of 2004 - that definitely made me hold off buying last year. And the majority of it has come to pass; I think the only missing piece is the BIOS-less BIOS stuff.

But beyond that is that I hardly use the desktop PC at home anymore... I mean it still collects email for me. Holds a bunch of files including the music and photo collection... but aside from Money - since sitting at a desk is helpful while writing checks - and, um... I think that's it. I was going to say Gaming but the Xbox has crushed the PC in my home. I had to - I've wasted countless hours twiddling AGP/PCI settings and BIOS tweaks and upgrades, just to get a game to run optimally. To me, that's to be expected, since PC Gaming companies can't dictate a PC's configuration and there's endless variations out there - the Xbox is a dedicated HD platform with a fixed configuration... drop in the DVD and you're done.

And that's that. I figure my next upgrade in hardware will be for Vista, and that will be more from want than "speed". I'm going to want a widescreen monitor. I'm going to want a Serial-ATA HD. I'm going to want a new case for it, too, I'm sure. It'll be a good time to go 1Up on everything: video, RAM, Monitor, HD, CPU, Motherboard - the whole shmear, instead of my usual piecemeal upgrading... Hell, maybe I'll just go get a Dell next time, and finally stop building my own PCs...

Eep! What did I just say?!

Maybe I am getting old.