Five Days Later

[digitaldiscipline]

Kim's coming back from Buffalo tonight. Yay!

The bed will stop being too big, and maybe the cats will stop hating me for her not being here. When she's home, you can't roll over or go to the bathroom without getting a cat in the face, or the ankle, or whatever. When it's just me? Maybe one of four will deign to lurk by the foot of the bed.

If they didn't keep devouring the food and water and filling the litter boxes with toxic waste, I'd never know there were four of 'em in the house. One or two, maybe.

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Should be getting the last parts of the Quad Damage set from the FedEx depot tonight - I missed their delivery attempt Saturday, and they never bothered to try and come on Monday, when I was home all day (Monday wasn't some obscure holiday, right? It was a regular business day...? Fuckers.) Big-ass heatsinks require backplane mounting brackets, so it would have been pointless to pre-build the rigs with the stock coolers only to have to tear them down again to remount the coolers.

If nothing else, I know how I'm going to spend my evenings and a good portion of this weekend - swearing at Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, and then trying not to spooge all over the screen when I finally get some games installed. This current upgrade, from hardware that's more than three years old to something only a couple weeks/months behind the bleeding edge is going to be one of the most meaningful and dramatic iterations of this since going from a Pentium 133 to a PII 200, or possibly from a single K6-2 475 (yes, arcsine, the one you built me!) or PIII 560 to a dual-PIII setup at 900.

Baal's getting an even bigger boost - from a first-gen P4 1.6 and an nVidia 5200 to quad-core goodness pushing 3GHz+ and a 9800GTX. I fear the his brain is just going to melt, or blow the top of his head off. Fortunately, he's usually got a hat on.

Comments

[arcsine.livejournal.com]

Holy shit, I forgot all about that one. What else did I put in there?

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Via 503+ motherboard... I think it was sporting some CAS2 PC133, too, maybe.

[arcsine.livejournal.com]

Heh, that thing still had a DIN 5 keyboard connector on it. Damn, that's oldschool.

[inyou.livejournal.com]

You sure you have drivers for 64bit? I've been running vista 32 business at work for a little over a year now, and just made the switch on my laptop that is about... 7 years old. The audio drivers and the video drivers will be your biggest thing. They redid the audio stack for vista.

At least in a Windows Domain IT administration area, Vista 64-bit doesn't support enough "legacy" software (i.e. pre-vista) for IT. 32-bit seems to be fairly okay.

[mighty-man.livejournal.com]

If you're running on a laptop that's 7 years old, drivers of any sort might be a problem!

The video drivers will be easy because the video card is Nvidia and close to cutting edge for a single card desktop solution. The audio drivers shouldn't be too bad because the motherboard is by a fairly large, reputable and popular company (Gigabyte) and the chipset is already mature (P35).

Oh yeah, this is a pretty big upgrade for me too, it'll be going to replace my daily use desktop machine which has a Athlon XP2500+ mobile CPU.

[inyou.livejournal.com]

Well, actually the 7 y ears ago would have been the 1st one I got for real cheap for my CS degree program. I was using a p2 233 IBM Thinkpad, and upgraded at some point in the future from that to a p4 1.8 Dell XPS M140.... so I guess that was in more recent history, but still years old...