Birthday fit for a king

Despite knowing that I would be attending a funeral the next day, I had a terrific birthday. In truth, I've been looking forward to this day for quite some time, having on several occasions put off the decision to upgrade my computer in hopes that I would be able to do so on my birthday. My wife came to Toronto for the weekend, and we headed off early Saturday morning to shop for computers.

I thought I knew what I wanted, having just spent a considerable amount of time "window shopping" and perusing newspaper flyers. With Intel recently announcing a new chip set, some of the local dealers were beginning to offer fairly substantial discounts on their current stock.

I shopped the way I always do... trying to find a good blend of performance and price. On this occasion, it meant looking at the 2.4GHz P4's instead of looking for more horsepower. I don't play games, so any additional speed would be money wasted. It happened that MDG was running an end-of-month special, offering "free" upgrades of memory and disk capacity. The deal was: buy a 512MB RAM / 80 GB hard drive system, and they would upgrade it to 1000MB RAM, 120GB drive at no additional charge.

They also offered a Lexmark X74 multi-function printer free (after rebate).

So, with a couple of upgrades (like a drool 17" LCD monitor and DVD drive) on the basic package, I went home a happy camper.

I was on cloud nine most of the remainder of the day, but I still managed to remember that my lovely wife had made the trip to Toronto, and I managed to tear myself away from the new toy long enough to have a very enjoyable time with her.