Gratis, the company behind the various www.free***.com sites (and the original free iPod folks), provide banners for use on sites like mine, but they don’t really keep them up to date. For example, the banner for the Free PC site is all about the Dell machine you can get, but they recently added a Sony Vaio as a possible choice. Now, I’m not sure why, since its specs are not that different from the Dell, but the Sony machine just seems more appealing 🙂 … here is Gratis’s blurb on the new box:

Got a digital lifestyle? Well, www.FreeDesktopPC.com is about to make your life a whole lot easier! We’re now offering Sony’s brand new Vaio computer, loaded with multimedia software to help digitize all parts of your life. It comes bundled with “Click to DVD Software” that allows you to take those dusty VHS tapes and 8mm camcorder cassettes and transfer them right to DVD. The Vaio burns DVD+R dual layer discs for up to 8.5 GB of storage, and the PC itself has an amazingly huge 80 GB HD! Check it out, and go get yours at www.FreeDeskTopPC.com

What about you, what PC manufacturer do you prefer? I have two Dells at home, another Dell at work, and a Compaq/HP laptop… I’m pretty happy with the Dell boxes (which is why I bought my last home machine in 99, and then another Dell this year) although I’ve heard that their power supplies use a different pin configuration than ‘standard’, which has prevented me from replacing my power supply with a quiet one … actually I have no idea if that rumour is true, but it has meant that I need to do some research before I can buy a new PSU so it is has caused me to delay that purchase for about a year!

FWIW, the free flat screen site added a new monitor too, a 19" Sony… not a huge jump in specs over the 17" that they had, but still… 19" > 17" 🙂