Dell XPS 8300

You may recall that approximately 3 years ago, I purchased a Dell XPS 1530 laptop. And after around 3 years of use, the DVD drive has started to break down.

To be fair, this wasn't really a surprise. The DVD drive on my old XPS 1530 was a slot drive and slot drives are notoriously prone to breaking. The laptop itself is still working fine - its just that I can't use the DVD drive (which is annoying). Still, after 3 years of solid use, I guess I shouldn't complain too much. All of which is just a really long winded way for me to say that I was in the market for a new PC.

Cue the XPS 8300.

Its a pretty nice machine which, although not top end, is good enough for my purposes. I went with the i5 processor as being a nice middle ground to avoid the extremely high premiums charged for the newest tech. However, a 23" monitor, 8GB of RAM and a 2TB HDD soon brought the cost up to just under HK$8,500. Granted, not exactly breaking the bank but still considered relatively expensive by modern standards. A fair price to pay for the specs I was getting though.

And after using it for about a week, I have to say that I love how much faster this machine is relative to my old laptop. It's incredible how much zippier everything is - particularly noticeable whenever I move files around. I also played the last couple of campaign missions of SW:EAW on my new desktop and the improved graphics and speed of saving/loading just blew me away.