Aside from my trip to France, I was planning to go to more places; but due to the shitty weather, I decided to spend the money on something else. My computer was 5 years old, and even though it still worked fine, I badly needed a better computer.
When I ordered the computer they told me it would arrive Thursday, but since I would be in France that Thursday, I asked them to send it over the next Tuesday. Today my new machine arrived: an Acer Aspire M3640.
4GB memory
640GB Western Digital hard disk
Nvidia Geforce 8600 GS with 512MB memory.
Its not the latest hardware, but compared to my old machine its a very good upgrade. I also ordered a 4GB USB2 memory stick, which I use with Readyboost to make the system even smoother.