Today I took advantage of the Easter holiday to do some cleaning, and some shopping. I have been pondering upgrading my computer monitor for some time. Apple just lowered the prices of their flat panels this week so it sparked my renewed interest in upgrading. I have a 20″ Apple Cinema Display, so many would say why in the world would I need to upgrade? I believe you can’t have enough screen real-estate. My vision isn’t so hot so the bigger the screen the better. I was looking at several 23″ & 24″ models during the week. Most of them are noticeably cheaper than the Apple ones, but they don’t look anywhere near as nice as the Apple displays. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to shell out $600 for a big piece of ugly black plastic.
Since I was on the fence with my decision I went down to the Apple Store. The 5th ave. store in Manhattan is open 24/7/365. And sure enough on Easter Sunday there was a line to get down the stairs into the store. It was packed. I found a 20 & 23″ display to compare side by side. The 20″ looks small compared to the 23″ one. Of course the 30″ is massive, but none of my computers could handle that display. I also like to put my desktop and laptop on a KVM and no KVM that I know of would ever handle the resolution of the 30″, so that one was out of the running for the foreseeable future. After standing in front of a 23″ display and browsing on the web for a few minutes I was convinced that this was the monitor I wanted, and that it was well worth the hefty price tag. I bought the monitor and caught a cab home and was up and running with the new display in 20 minutes. So far it is fantastic.
I have cleaned up my old 20″ display and put it back in the original packaging (yes I try to keep all of that stuff since I know I upgrade more often than most people) and it is ready to be sold to a needing friend or ebay.
Once done setting up the new monitor I continued to clean up my apartment. I pulled my Mini I had been using as a DVR computer. It was working great but I decided that wasting a Vista license and my Mini as a DVR was not worth it. I put back the old DVR box, but realized that the power supply was making rather nasty sounds. I never realized how bad it was until it was off for a week and then I turned it back on. I ended up pulling that computer also and I will use my Cable box DVR for now until I figure out what I want to do with the computer DVR setup I have.
Now I am off to mop and empty my dish washer!
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