Today I bought a PC. There, I said it, and I'm not ashamed. Truth be told, I have a lot of respect for Windows and the way it does certain things, and feel that I'm doing myself no favours in the industry by confining my knowledge to Mac OS (whisper it: 3% marketshare*) when there's lots of sweet moolah to be made writing about PCs. Plus – and let's be honest about this – I just wanted one. So having hunted about for ages, I find I have some cash to spend, and I picked up a good little deal on eBay.

This is a low-end PC by today's standards – 2.8GHz Celeron D, 512MB RAM, 80GB hard disk, DVD-ROM, XP Home – but it only cost me £199, it's brand new, and those specs would have been impressive only a couple of years ago. Doing some work on Pricerunner shows that to get the same specs brand new online would take £330. And if we look at, say, the 'best value' model in PC World's current sale, it costs £100 more and has half the RAM, and an AMD Sempron 3000 chip that runs at only 1.8GHz. True, it includes a 17in CRT, but who wants that when you have a decent 19in TFT? (I now need to get a decent KVM switch, but the decent ones tend to be expensive – like, £80-on-Amazon-expensive – and I don't know if it's worth getting a cheap one. Need to do some research.)

Very exciting all told, but I imagine it'll be a while before it arrives at this time of year. It'll be good to use Windows XP on a decent-spec'd machine rather then trying to convince my 800MHz G4 iBook to chug along with VirtualPC.

In other news, we have been alternating festive viewing on our MiniCine™ (as I like to call it. In my mind.) between my wife's choice of trash TV (Season 3 of Dawson's Creek) and mine (Emma's Christmas gift to me of the complete series of the weird, made-for-TV mini-seriesTaken). I don't actually mind The Creek, but the dialogue truly is fucking awful. The actors who play Pacey, Jen, Grams and Jack can sometimes make a silk purse from a sow's ear, but the rest of them are just ... shite. Every time Katie Holmes' droopy mug comes on screen, and every time Dawson "I-have-a-chip-on-my-shoulder-the-size-of-my-already-abnormally-large-forehead" Leery psychoanalyses another quite unimportant plot twist, I hurl abuse at the screen. The abuse may soon be followed by rotten fruit. Just have sex already, people. You're all clearly in your late twenties. Now granted, this show is aimed at teenage girls, so the direction I'd like to see the characters move in is somewhat at odds with the programme-makers intentions, but hey, a man can dream. And shout stuff at the TV.

Night, night.

* This traditionally-quoted figure is highly contentious. The fact is that most figures for market share are based on unit sales. Fair enough, you may say, but in truth people tend to run Macs for a lot longer than PCs, so if we're talking installed user base, and taking into account the post-iPod impact of the Mac mini, I wouldn't be surprised if we're talking nearer 10%, and maybe even more.