farewell old friend, you have served me well

I bought my Gateway PC way back in '99. It was when one could walk into a Gateway store and the Pentium 3 had just been released. The original specs were: 14GB HDD, nVidia graphics card with a whopping 16MB RAM, 500MHz P3 processor, 56k modem, and 128MB RAM . Heck, I don't even remember i what the specific type of RAM it is. All I know is since then I have maxed out the RAM to 348MB, upgraded the video card to an nVidia 4400Ti that has 128MB on it, added a CD burner in addition to the factory installed CD-ROM drive, floppy drive, and the Zip drive.
Well, it is time to put this PC to rest. I have noticed over the past few months that web pages take longer and longer to load, and it just feels sluggish, especially compared to my G5- everything feels slow. I have just reached the point where, even though I hardly do anything at my desk, I am just sick and tired of having two computers take up so much real estate. Aside from the occasional glitch when viewing something through Safari/Firefox on my G5 cos it's just not 100% compatible with stuff designed for IE, it is fine with me. It will suffice until I get a new laptop later this year.
I have been on the fence what my first major purchase will be (laptop or new TV), and I have decided it to be a DLP HDTV. I just cannot watch TV in the living room on a 22" Magnavox flat tube any more. There is nothing wrong with the TV itself, but after having had a 32" in there, it just isn't anything except tolerable.
Another reason I am waiting on a laptop is that I have noticed two things. The first being all the sales Dell and Gateway are having. They must be trying to clear out as much of their inventory as possible as the hybrid HDD is making its identity known. Here it is straight from Engadget-
Samsung and Microsoft have been touting the wonders of the hybrid hard drive since 2005 -- in other words "forever" on a technology timeline. Now, finally, Samsung is pushing their ReadyDrive-friendly HHD out the door to OEMs starting today (March 7). The MH80 series of 2.5-inch drives build in 128/256MB of NAND flash to augment the traditional 80/120/160GB of traditional hard disk capacity. Samsung claims that their new HHDs offer 5x the reliability of conventional hard disks while shaving up to 50% off Windows Vista boot times and cutting power consumption by 70-90% to deliver about 30-minutes more laptop run-time off battery. Sweet. No prices given, but look for 'em to hit higher-end laptops as relatively costly (no prices given) options any day now. With any luck, the higher cost will be offset by more bang-for-the-buck.
Add to that DirectX10 coming out and the possibility of an LED lit LCD, I would rather wait a few months and finally get a new TV.

On a final note- how sad is it that my old PC had a smaller HDD than my iPod? For shame...