I go with what works, not with what has the most bells and whistles.

Where I get into trouble is when the applications leave me behind, which is what happened this time. Solidworks current version won't even install under Win2000. So far, the change has been relatively benign.

The bottleneck now is my seven-year-old pig of a computer, and unless a new contract pops up next year, that isn't going to get any better. It's particularly annoying now that so many websites seem to think I want to see movies. If it's very quiet, sometimes you can hear my Quicktime application sobbing.

I am shopping, though. Although I've built every computer I've had since my PC-AT, it ain't getting any easier. I have to educate myself on a whole new level of technologies every time. My next graphics card probably isn't going to be AGP, and I've never had to worry about 32 bit vs. 64 bit before.

Still, getting a system from Dell or other fabricators makes me nervous, too. It's hard to find out exactly what components they're using, although I can make some educated guesses from working backwards on things like chipsets. I suspect they aren't always top-of-the-line.

I don't cut any corners on critical components, which is why my current system (Intel dual Pentium 3) ran me almost $5,000 just for the box and its guts (I already had a monitor and keyboard). However, my only major hardware failure in seven years was a cooling fan on a graphics board that fried the board when it failed.