The Hard Drive

A couple of Christmases ago, a couple of bonus checks and a computer crash led to one of the best Christmas gifts we ever gave the family: The iMac. I'm typing on it right now.

We've used it to video chat and edit videos, and store pictures and play games and store music and connect keep calendar dates and used all the features on Photo Booth.

And, it came with a 250-gig hard-drive. When we got it, my work computer had a 40-gig drive and I thought we'd NEVER fill up the iMac's storage capacity.

Well, I'm here to tell you, that with four people keeping separate iTunes accounts and two teenage daughters with photos and such, we've actually filled this beast up. Got the little message that says we're out of space and please don't add anything more to me. My guess is that there's actually 8 iTunes accounts because we have this program called Senuti (iTunes backwards, get it?) that allows you to take the stuff off you iPod and put it directly onto your machine quickly and easily. And, Kid2 plays this Sims game a lot and I think she's got lots of worlds and stuff saved. I've also got a bunch of movies that Handbrake saves especially for iPod usage at 1 gig per movie. But, I'll have my friend Retrophisch come over soon and clear it all up with his amazing Mac knowledge and we'll get back to peak performance with the newly purchased 500-gig external drive.

The way I figure it, this gives us another year or so.

And, I remember when the first computer Tracy and I purchased had a floppy disk (that joke in Sixteen Candles still works for us, while today's teens ask, "What's a floppy disk?") and 1-gig of memory. We payed over $500 for it. I paid 20% of that price for the backup/external storage drive.

Wow.