Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - Wed, 11 Jan 2006

The story of the PC being repaired at Best Buy (see Dec 14 and Nov 6) has successfully concluded. Best Buy was unable to repair the computer in 60 days. After 60 days, their extended warranty promises a replacement computer. Despite the hassles involved in getting to the 60 days, I am pleased that the manager at my Best Buy store was very willing to supply the replacement. When I wasn’t entirely happy with just getting the same computer back, he said I had the option of paying the difference and upgrading. The computer I selected was an HP Media Center PC with 1 GB of RAM and lots of bells and whistles.

I wasn’t expecting this when I went in, but now I have a replacement for my aging 600 Mhz Windows 98 computer that I bought almost 6 years ago. Even though that computer was fine for most things including developing Behold, I think this is coming at a perfect time. Windows 98 sometimes freezes on me and it is maddening to occasionally lose up to an hour of work on Behold and then need to redo it. Also, there are starting to be more and more programs that require more than Windows 98 to run, e.g. Acrobat 7.0, Google Earth, Microsoft AntiSpyware and many others. With the new computer, I’ll be able to upgrade to Delphi 2006 (1 GB RAM recommended) and take advantage of its many features that aid in developing a program.

Once I transfer everything over, I’ll keep the old computer and use it as a backup for my Behold work and the other important files on my and my daughters’ computers. I can also continue testing Behold on Windows 98 … which makes me think: How many people out there are hanging onto Windows 98? Should I continue developing Behold for it? Microsoft is pulling their support of Windows 98 after this summer. So should I continue support for Windows 98 into the future or not? Comments on this would be appreciated. I’ll add the question to the Behold Forum.