I gotta admit, I'm outta my depth in some areas of this new machine. It's the first one I haven't built myself, and since I wasn't planning on getting a new one for a long time before I lucked into this one, I haven't been researching the tech. Some of the stuff is complete greek to me.

My last machine has SCSI connections to the hard drives. This has little cables with a protocol called SATA. Never heard of it, but it works, so I ain't screwing with it.

The monitor hooks up with a big digital plug, not the usual monitor connector. I spent an hour trying to get the computer to pipe sound into the monitor's built-in speakers, figuring somehow that audio linkage must be built into that nice big new connector. Imagine my surprise when I found out I still had to connect the computer and monitor with an ordinary miniature stereo plug cable. The little audio connector hole in the monitor was out of sight under a bump on the back.

I guess some things don't change.

The tower is huge, shiny black, and impressive, but inside it's mostly air and not much computer. Kind of like under the hood of my old Delta 88. It took me a minute to locate the three tiny 500 GB hard drives tucked away in a corner.