« The Land Where Expo 67 Never Ended | Main | Make You Strong Just Like A Vitamin»
April 28, 2006
It's Hard To Blog Without A Computer
After six years of hacking away at the same old Pentium III desktop, Bonnie and I and took a trip down to Fry's (the Mecca of Electronics shops), ready to buy components for a new machine. They had a motherboard-CPU combo for one low low price, so I picked up an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (running at a cool 2.2 GHz), 2 GB of RAM and a case. The motherboard has onboard video and sound, and I was able to cannibalize my old machine for a wireless network card, DVD RAM drive and 250 GB hard drive.
After putting it all together and installing Windows (32-bit... I'll wait for Vista 64 before making the great leap into the world of large address spaces), something was wrong. Disk access was unusably slow, and any disk activity meant sound would come out garbled, and even the mouse pointer would be jerky. I scoured the Internets for people who had similar problems, but no luck. I tried reinstalling drivers, defragging my hard drive, and even lighting scented candles, in the hopes to get the computer "in the mood", but nothing worked. Finally, I bit the bullet and formatted my C drive and started over.
Things seem to be working alright now. I haven't finished installing the myriad of software I use (Office, Visual Studio, Civilization II, etc), but I was sure to throw on a web browser so I could bang out this blog entry so my sister would stop nagging me.
But what about my old computer? Luckily, I had enough ambient computer parts lying around the apartment to keep the old Funkbox up and running. I plan to make it into a server of some sort, perhaps even use it to hone my mad web programming skizillz and serve up some dynamic self-indulgent tripe.
My first computer, a black rack-mounted Pentium 166 MHz I got at Corel's fire sale for $20, was affectionately known as Blackie. My second was the self-assembled 850 MHz Funkbox. Today I announce to the world: Hulihee.
