Seeing how my trusty Athlon64X2 took its sweet time computing on my astronomical pictures, I decided I needed a fast, recent machine to take over the heavy-duty processing.

For a good while I doubted whether to get a PC or a notebook, but finally settled on the notebook - the idea being that I might well take it on a holiday trip, or even use it in the field.

I went for pretty high specs - quad i7, pretty decent RAM, especially a quick SSD (even if not overly large, but that's what the fileserver - my Athlon64X2 - is for). Also, I wanted a non-glare high-res screen, and wanted to avoid having to pay for an useless MS Windows license.

I did end up finding this Terra machine which I could somewhat taylor to my expectations, for a correct price (about 1300 EUR, beginning of 2014). The tayloring part was for the storage and OS aspects - by default, this box comes with Windows 8 and a 1TB hard drive, I got the SSD and no OS (actually, FreeDOS and OpenGEM came pre-installed).

It turns out this box really is quick, but my astro processing still requires a (long) coffee break - interactive work with GIMP etc. is still massively better than on the previous box.