Buying a new computer for your parents is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Or so Mitch would say.

Last week, on Sunday, December 23, 2007, I went home for christmas. My dad had complained that the computer, a Dell Dimension from 2001 (yes, it uses RD-RAM) was shutting down randomly. I brought my PC repair kit from home, and dinked with the system shortly after walking into the house (and after my two-hour drive down south).

I noticed that the system was booting slow, but the system logs didn't show anything too abnormal. So I decided to run a few more intensive scans on the hard drive. From those scans, I found that the hard drive was starting to fail. I was able to restore it to normal operation, but it is now only a matter of time before the drive is gone far enough that it'll just die off one day.

My dad was determined. Finally, he had an excuse to get a new computer. Mom was none-too-happy, but she'll live with it. My dad has had his eyes set on a new iMac for quite some time now, and finally, he was an excuse to get one. He's going with the 20" iMac 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB DDR2 RAM and a 250 GB Hard Drive. Ordered Sunday night, arriving, tentatively on Saturday, December 29, 2007. If it does arrive on that day, I'll be heading home either that day, or the day after to set up the system for them and retuning home the following day. My biggest concern is the fact that it won't be just a new computer for them, but also an entirely new operating system, one that is really new. I've never so much as booted a Leopard machine, and with only a year or so of Tiger experience, I'm a little worried to say the lest, but I am confident in being able to use VNC to manage their computer. Besides, how bad could running the world's most user-friendly operating system be? Never mind, parents always find a way to break computers.

More on this as it develops...