This Thursday my usual morning routine, playing two matches with Manchester City in Football Manager 2009, was disrupted by a nasty bluescreen. I rebooted only to be welcomed by another bluescreen upon entering Windows. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t the hardware's fault as my computer has been very reliable for three years and was built with good components. Still, since the easiest solution would probably be to reinstall Windows or locating that faulty driver this was the catalyst for buying a new computer and switching from XP to Windows 7 that I had been waiting for.

Since I’m working at a customers office in Sundbyberg during the summer, just a few hundred meters from Webhallen, the circumstances was perfect for buying a new computer on impulse. So, during the lunch me and Andreas (one of the customers developers) headed over to Webhallen and started shopping. Since I’m very happy with my Antec Sonata chassis and Seasonic PSU I decided to keep them, but I bought pretty much everything else. Here’s my shopping list:

• Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard (Socket 775, DDR3)
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3,0GHz, 6MB cache)
• 2 x 2048MB Corsair XMS3 (PC3-12800, 9-9-9-24)
• Asus GeForce 9600GT 512MB
• Intel 80GB X25-M SATA 2.5" (SSD)

While most of the hardware isn’t something particularly special the real beauty is the hard drive. I’ve had a solid state disk in my laptop at work (a Dell Precision M6400) for a few months now and I’m loving it! Or at least I think I do. It may just be that the other components in the computer is great, but my gut tells me it’s the disk that makes tasks like installation of new software, starting up programs like Photoshop and even compiling sooo much faster than with any of the machines I’ve previously used.

Today I installed most of the software that I usually use such as Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, Photoshop, Flash, Office, a couple of SVN clients, and a few other programs. It took less than an hour! SSD FTW!

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