The New Home Office

When Robyn and I were married, I told her that in my line of work I was likely going to need to purchase a new computer every 2-3 years.  My laptop is several years old, so we've been talking for several months about the possibility of me getting a new desktop.

I love my laptop because it's portable, but I really wanted a dual monitor setup.  I also wanted to have a Windows 8 machine because I'm interested in doing some Windows 8 development.

After talking about it for several months, we finally pulled the trigger.  Behold my sweet new setup!

I had an old monitor from a desktop that died a few years ago.  I also had a set of speakers.  I bought a new touchscreen monitor to be the main monitor and used the old ghetto one for the second screen.

I'm totally loving it!  Windows 8 definitely takes some getting used to, but I actually really like the live tiles.  I have it setup to have the weather on my main screen, both locally as well as a few different cities (Clovis, CA where Robyn's parents live, and Minot, ND which is the coldest place I've ever lived.)  I also have facebook on my live tiles.  It's kind of cool because it shows a small stream of recent updates from my friends.

I also figured out how to make Windows boot into normal desktop mode, so I can feel warm and fuzzy in normal windows unless I choose to move to the tiled mode.

This setup will be much better for when I need to work from home.  The small screen of my laptop is painful when I do work on it.  This setup will probably get me writing more code at home.  And if I'm being honest, I should probably admit that this setup might revive some of my gaming that has been lying dormant for a while.

It's also really crazy to think that this computer was one third of the price of the 486 my dad bought when I was a preteen, and it's about 600 times as powerful.

Technology is cool.