New computer up and running

If I didn't have a family, a job, a business, run marathons and a few websites, I still wouldn't have enough time to take advantage of all the electronic entertainment in our house. I've installed a new computer in the last few days and rather than using something like PC mover to copy all the installations (which I did last time and got confused by some of the Sony files I had on my HP) I chose to install every piece of software after reviewing whether I really needed it.

I had forgotten some of the things I had and there are so many things that can be networked around the house such as music streaming on radios that also play music from my computer and TVs that play iPlayer, YouTube etc.

And why did I need a new computer? There were four reasons all solvable but was it worth it for a 4 year old PC when a new one would be so many faster.

1. The card reader for photos had not worked for several months and I had a complicated way of copying files from a laptop.
2. The USB ports had not been working properly since Christmas causing me more problems.
3. The graphics card would not work with my video editing software for over a year and an attempt to upgrade the graphics card had failed when the motherboard didn't like it.
4. I was getting extremely short of space on my 500Gm hard disk.

Whilst preparing to copy files 1-2 mysteriously started to work again. Then I found a software upgrade that finally solved 3. Now that I have loaded my files I am left with just 90GB of a 1TB hard disk free - I had forgotten that I previously had 2 hard disks in the old one - 400GB and 500GB!

So I am going to have to add a second hard disk at an early stage

But it was nice to do everything in one place on Saturday and I think I completed the photos and video uploads in record time.

I'm still keeping Picassa and my photo collection on the old PC for a while though as the face tagging is not working on the new PC yet. Having spent 100 hours or more doing that I am going to be extremely careful.