Early last week Nadia bought me a new PC to replace my five-year-old WinXP machine. It arrived yesterday afternoon.

Dubbed TELETRAN3 (in keeping with the Transformers theme), this PC marks a few firsts for me:

HP M8000E

  1. It’s my first dual-core machine
  2. It’s my first AMD (Athlon 64 x2 5000+, to be exact)
  3. It’s my first Vista PC (Home Premium)
  4. It’s my first HP desktop

This HP Pavilion M8000E is nearly identical to Nadia’s TELETRAN1 mk2. I like how well her machine is able to act as a media hub - she watches and records TV on it, copies her recorded shows to her Zen Vision:M (a portable media player), maintains her music library and uses her Xbox 360 as an extender to access that content. Additionally, her PC is a better DVR than Comcast’s DVR could ever hope to be. Naturally, I wanted to be able to do everything she can do.

I just started setting everything up. Right now I have TV working on it, I have my 360 talking to it, URGE is loaded in WMP11 and Firefox is my default browser.