Got out for a little while this evening and picked up the BluRay writer that was on sale for $60 less than usual. The sale brought it into the realm of affordable, and I also found a small spool of BD disks on sale at 40% of the original price. They hold 25GB instead of the usual 4.something GB of a regular DVD (the double layer ones are about 9GB). This will be for backup of things on the computer.

So, I came home opened up the computer, plugged in a couple of things, slid in the new drive, then started looking at the software disk that came with it. I ended up installing about half of the features, then uninstalling half of I'd installed. I may take the rest out also, since the software that comes with these things are usually "value added" for people who don't have all of the software I'm already using. And it's pushy, all wanting to queue up in the auto start menu. That slows the computer. I booted several out of the start menu. (There's a wonderful little program that Bill D told me about, called WinPatrol, that is good for this kind of thing.)

That's it for the computer purchases for now. It is complete, up to the size and speed and specs I wanted, and the total for this comes out at about $1100 if you include the software I bought at work to use with it. It would have cost a couple hundred more if I'd had all of these features added at HP, and a lot more than that if I'd bought the software through them. Being able to get under the hood can be very satisfying!

I'm going to be scanning a lot of stuff and going to be adding a lot of audio files to this computer, getting started on those projects to do with my parents and grandparents that I've planned for a while.

SRS