Presenting The New Munin

I didn't sleep for crap last night.
First of all, I didn't go to bed until after 3, and then when I did I couldn't get to sleep because I could hear a squirrel - or some other animal - running around in the attic.
I didn't feel like actually going up there to scare it away, so I just pulled down the steps slightly and then let them close back up and hoped that would be sufficient.
It was, but it was also sufficient to let some insulation fibers drift down and get on me.
My skin and eyes react immediately to even the slightest exposure to insulation, so my attempts to sleep were interrupted by itchiness that forced me, finally, at around 4:30 AM, to take a shower to scour away any traces of insulation.
I got to sleep sometime shortly thereafter, and was awoken at 9:30 by someone misdialing my number while attempting to call the pharmacy.
I decided to stay up and undertake my usual Saturday morning journey into the world to stop at the comic shop, gas up, and go grocery shopping.
I added a stop at Best Buy to my itinerary.
Ever since Scott and I performed compucide on Munin I've been wanting to buy a replacement Munin.
I figured on just getting some cheap, no-frills desktop, but last weekend I'd been at Staples and saw that they had an HP Touchsmart on clearance for a very good price, so on Thursday I stopped there on my way home.
I asked the kid working there - the same one who'd helped me out with my office furniture purchase a few weeks back - about it, and he said that they weren't sure they were actually willing to sell it - the display model was the one actually being sold for that price - as it was, as he put it, "flaky."
I figured it was nothing that a format and reinstall couldn't fix, and I wasn't put off by the missing "U" key on the keyboard (I have plenty of spare keyboards at home), so he fired it up. It booted, which was a good sign.
However, he couldn't get into Windows, as it wasn't accepting the password. He went off to confer with the manager, and a bit later came back and said that a customer had, apparently, changed the password, and that, in fact, they weren't going to sell it, but rather return it to HP.
I stopped at Office Depot after I left there and saw a small Acer system that I thought about picking up, but ultimately decided to put the purchase off until the weekend.
Which brings us to today. I checked out a couple of options, but ultimately decided on an HP Slimline system.


I probably should have included something to indicate scale; the new Munin is about one-third the size of a typical desktop system.

For those of you interested in such things...
Core 2 Duo Processor (2.50 GHz), 4 GB RAM, 500 GB Hard drive, crappy Nvidia on-board graphics, crappy on-board sound card, and Windows Vista Home Premium (64 Bit).
It's kind of a mixed bag of cool and puzzling.

The cool:
Built-in wireless

The puzzling:
That doesn't include Bluetooth

The cool:
It has an HDMI output

The puzzling:
It has VGA out rather than DVI

Still, I wasn't looking for a top-of-the-line system, and this more than fits the bill for what I want to use it for.
What I want to use it for is to have a spare on hand if Hugin is busy doing something processor/memory-intensive (as it is now; more on that in a bit), and to maintain my comic book database on it, seeing as how it's in the room where all of my comics are piled up.
One thing of note about the system is that it's running 64 Bit Vista, which means it can actualy take advantage of the full 4 GB of RAM.
That's something that's bothered me about Hugin. With 32 Bit Vista, it only utilizes something like 3.25 GB of the 4 GB of RAM installed. I'd thought about upgrading to 64 Bit Vista to get past that limitation, but it didn't seem worth the expense just to gain .75 GB of RAM.
(I say "just," but tha'ts 750 MB of RAM. My first computer had 4 MB of RAM. How soon we forget...)
On the other hand, it would be worth it to make the 64 Bit upgrade if I had more RAM, but I'd been led to believe that Hugin's motherboard only supported 4 GB. I learned that's not the case: it maxes out at 8 GB, which would make the upgrade much more worthwhile.
So, while I was spending money, I ponied up for 8 GB of RAM - I have to completely replace what's in Hugin - and the 64 Bit Vista Ultimate upgrade.
I figure on doing a clean install, so I needed to back up Hugin's hard drive. To accomplish that - and to deal with my ever-expanding storage needs - I picked up a 1 TB external drive.
I haven't gotten around to the upgrade yet, as the backing up has been taking the better part of the day; it takes a long time (and apparently a lot of resources, hence my current use of the new Munin to post this) to copy 300+ GB of data.
So that's been my day.
I think I'm officially done spending money for a while. When I got home today I got a call from my bank verifying the purchases I made. Evidently I've established an irregular spending pattern over the past couple of days.
In any case, I just wanted to introduce you all to the newest member of my computer family.