After work on Saturday I went over to work on my parents' computer. It's 3-4 years old and it's been having some problems. Dad tried to repair windows with the install cd and it wasn't booting. We fixed that, but since it runs very slow and the video card appears to be dying, he decided that he still wanted a new one. When my dad makes a decision, he gets it done pretty fast, so we got on BestBuy.com and picked one out. Then we went to the Best Buy in Lee's Summit and bought it. Here are the specs:

Gateway 503GR
1 GB RAM
160 GB SATA hard drive
Dual layer DVD+/-RW
3.0 GHz P4 processor
17" LCD
Total price: $979

That is the most awesome computer of anyone I know. And the price was very good. I haven't seen the 503GR on Gateway's site at all, and you can't find it at Best Buy anymore. It must have bee a holiday special. Dad also found a $79 UPS (battery back-up) that was on sale and had Best Buy and manufacturer's rebates so that the final cost was $6. Dang. They had 256 MB flash drives for $49, but a guy comes up and says that they're on sale for $30, with a $15 mail-in rebate. So he got one of those ($15!) and a 512 MB for $30 after rebate.

We got it home and I uninstalled some of the crap that comes on it (read: AOL) and then I added Firefox, AVG and OpenOffice (it came with Works). We hooked it into their new DSL and set up user accounts so everyone keeps their settings separate. We used the flash drive to move all of their files from the old computer to the new. I also tricked out Firefox with several useful extensions (Gmail Notifier, Adblock, Weatherfox, Bloglines toolkit).

They're giving me the old computer. Even though it's old, it is much better than the box I'm currently using for my webserver, so I think I'll migrate everything over. I've already downloaded and burned a cd for Ubuntu Linux. Once again, if you've read this whole post you may be a geek.