Fruity

I've been playing around with some digital music tools, mostly a software sequencer called, of all things, Fruity Loops. I'm totally hooked. This sounds pretty crappy because all I did was plop down the camcorder with my amp on one side and the computer with horrible sounding little game speakers on the other. I'm on the lookout for a used mixer so that I can balance everything out and feed it straight into the camera. I'm also waiting for a 5m optical interconnect so that I can feed the computer into the stereo for those times when it needs to be, shall we say, a bit louder? :)

Wow

I finally got everything from Newegg, so I put my computer back together this weekend. New motherboard, graphics card, power supply, CPU and RAM. I lost about a month's or so worth of pictures because I've been sloppy with backups, but I only had to spend about 5 minutes on the phone with Microsoft after XP started bitching about how the computer hardware had 'significantly changed'. Yeah, no kidding. But Windows came right back up, installed a ton of drivers and so far it seems like it's good to go. I'm still a bit leery of driver issues since I didn't reinstall XP, but I'm pretty impressed. Nice work Microsoft.

Compatible

So my stuff shows up from Newegg, I put the CPU and fan on the Mobo, Put the GPU on, I go to put the memory in ... oops. I forgot to check if my new Mobo was compatible with the memory that I already have. Of course it's not. Back to Newegg. Should get 2x1Gb DDR2-800 via UPS today. At the rate I'm going, getting XP to cooperate is probably going to want to make me kill myself.

Crash

So my computer bit the dust on Friday. I'm pretty sure that the motherboard is bad. I thought "I'll just buy a new one and swap it out and I'll be good to go". Well, I was wrong. I had a socket 475 processor and I was using a AGP graphics card. There are approximately 0 motherboards available in that configuration. So, now I not only need a new motherboard, but a new CPU and a new graphics card. At least I could get all of it for about $500. I got a 2 GHz duo proc so the CPU is a pretty big upgrade and the GPU is a decent upgrade. Getting windows to think that it's still the same computer is going to be a real hassle.

Of course, I sat down to watch TV last night and the TV wouldn't come on. I came pretty close to completely freaking out. The 'change lamp' light wasn't on. It just wouldn't power up. I just turned it off and walked away. Came back later, checked the cables, turned it on and it decided to work. Only so many things can break at once without me losing it.