I have been in need of a new home computer for some time now. I bought my most recent computer–a 15″ white MacBook–back in the fall of 2007 and I’ve been using that computer ever since. In recent years it has been limping along. The RAM has been replaced twice. The hard disk has been replaced twice. The battery filled up with excess gas and no longer works–so it doesn’t even have a battery in it any more. The computer limps along, but only because I made it limp along.

Earlier this year, I made a deal with Kelly that I would pay for a new computer entirely out of the money I earned from writing. Yesterday, that came to pass, and I am now the proud owner of a 27″ iMac. With nearly four times the screen real estate as my MacBook, I am supremely happy with my choice. Here is a look at the difference in size, for comparison:

The performance is also far superior to my MacBook, of course, but the screen real estate is what really makes the most noticeable difference to me.

The new iMacs come out in November and but I ended up buying one of the current models. Why didn’t I wait for the new model? I looked at the specifications for the new iMac and compared them to the current one. The current one was already a big upgrade from what I was using. The improvements in the new iMac were marginal at best, and certainly not worth the increased price. So I went with the current model. I paid less, and I got an additional discount on top of that, which also made me feel good.

But the best part of all was that the entire computer was paid out of money I earned from writing this year.

I was up late last night getting the computer set up and getting data transferred. I’ve run into one issue so far, a problem where the wireless connection seems to drop from time-to-time. This seems to be a known issue and I’ve tried several of the fixes and some of them have improved the situation. I’m not as concerned as I might otherwise be because I plan on eventually connecting this machine to ethernet in the house, from which I will get a faster connection anyway. I still have some things to set up, but for the most part I am able to be fully functional at this point. Having a lot of data in the cloud made some of this very easy.

And yes, this is the first blog post written on the new computer.

I did reset my keystroke counter when I moved to the machine. I want to keep better track of two things: how much I type in general, and also, how many keystrokes I can fit into a set of batteries on the wireless keyboard.

In the meantime, I am so glad to have my new computer. I earned it, quite literally.