Upgrades

Lots of things have been going on lately I suppose. I have upgraded quite a few things in my life lately. First of all, IE7 Beta1, thank you BitTorrent. Its not bad, though I will admit I had some troubles with it. I got the download to complete after about a week of trying to get it down. Once I did, being the silly geek boy that I am, I installed it on my system. No problems with the installation, like I had with Office 12 Beta. Rebooted the system and tried to go about my business as usual.

When I launched my beloved Trillian to get on and tell my buddie's about my new upgrade, it crashed. Not having the time to worry about fixing it I put it off. Well I have solved the problem, turns out the MSN plugin for Trillian requires some things that IE6 had, that IE7 does not. Its ok, Trillian's website had a new .dll file that simply had to be copied to a plugin directory. Problem solved.

I can't say that there is too much to call a major change. At least from the asthetic point of view. Its basically just IE6 with tabs. Though I will say there is a bit more lag. I dont' think pages load quite as rapidly, and there are some sites that don't work at all. My intranet site for instance, does not work with IE7 at all. Something I am sure I will have to find a work around for.

I have also recently recieved my Intel Retail Edge bundle. Consisting of a Intel Pentium D 820 processor (Dual 2.8GHz 2MB L2 cache), a D945PSN Motherboard, Windows XP Professional, and a couple of Adobe products. This puts me on the track to be able to do somthine that I have been dying to do for quite some time. Its time to start work on two systems. the first will be my new Desktop which I finally have to replace just about everything.

The new board requires me to have a SATA HD, something I have wanted for a long time anyway, but now since the new Mobo has only one IDE channell, it seems time to upgrade to a nice Big and Beefy SATA drive, probably the 250GB 16MB Cache Drive from Western Digital. I will also need to upgrade my DVD burner as the one I have is only a 4x single layer jobby, and we have 15X Dual Layer Jobbie's for like 60 bucks. I am also going to have to upgrade my memory. Intel has already made the switch to DDR2, so I am going to have to give up my 2GB of DDR400 that I am running currently and move over to probably just 512 of DDR2, at least to start with.

It seems it is also time for me to bid farewell to my GeForce 3 Ultra that I have had for over 5 years. In fact I got the thing before 9/11. Long time to have a video card I know, but it has certainly fullfilled its purpose.

Fortunatly for me, and my sanity, all of these old parts will not go to waste, as I finally get to work on my media center pc. I have been working this thing out in my head for some time now. I am going to need to get a new antenna for my new Router, so that my media server can go in another room. This will allow me to have a PVR without using any silly subscription garbage or monthly fee's. I mean why on earth would I want to pay TiVo to record shows for me when I can simply do it all myself on my own computer/Hometheater. It will be a long time before the thing is complete, as I still need a new case that will not look like a PC, and will eventually need a TV that will support HD and all that other good stuph. First up will be the Haupage 350 so that I have an HD tv tuner.

It will be a long time before either PC is complete, but at least I have a couple of really cool projects to work on for quite some time coming. I am excited. Its the first time in YEARS, since I have had to upgrade every part of my system. And its going to be a long process, since I think I am going to even get into some case modding on this guy. Might even be time for me to give the server a new case. Who knows they might all end up matching someday.