Where to next ?
Bit of advice please. Straight off have to say I'm not a geek and have only a basic working knowledge of IT.
At home we run a desktop PC hidden in a cupboard, concealed-wired to a monitor & wireless to keyboard/mouse/broadband in our living room. The printer sits in the same cupboard. We like this set up as its pretty social & unobtrusive. The tower has been upgraded component by component over the years with the latest being power supply (blew up), Primary Hard Drive (to 200GB), CPU and RAM, the latter two to alleviate freezing. We're running XP Home and archaic versions of Office but have latterly installed Thunderbird and Firefox.
Now the problem is we keep getting power interruptions, boot fails and repetitive disk checking. I suspect this may be down to a hardware problem (have changed the main cable which helped for a while) or overheating of the CPU (not sure the heatsink bonding is 100%). However, allied to the out of date OS and Apps, I'm getting the impression its a bit like tinkering with an old car and maybe its time for a new one......
I generally have a work laptop so most of the Excel type stuff I can do on there. I will also be leaving my current company soon and expect to be able to keep this laptop as part of the settlement. Its a 3-year old Dell Latitude running XP Pro. I would expect to get a new laptop with whatever new employment I can gain.
Our home requirements are pretty basic - e-mail, web surfing, photos, itunes, letter writing, burn music CD's for the cars, kiddie stuff (daughters 5 & 3) etc. No gaming or heavy multimedia. We do have a fairly new Plasma TV but I wouldn't know where to start or what it could do re integration (we're not big movie buffs)
Question is, what should we do ?
Keep upgrading the tower
Buy a new tower to bring us back to a baseline of stability
Wait for W7 and go for multi-licence (incl the inherited laptop)
Buy a second laptop and docking station
Budget is pretty limited and whilst Mac's are pretty funky and supposed to be stable, residing in a cupboard don't do much for aesthetics and I've always found Apple stuff strangely counter-intuitive. I've not used the freeware equivalents of Excel/Word etc - are they any good and in anyway cross-readable ?