Rant #008 Sunday, December 14, 2003

It's been a busy week.

First, my main workstation (where 2214 is created) went through a complete hardware / software overhaul. Strangely enough, the total upgrade wasn't the original intention. At first, I simply wanted to upgrade the RAM, so Photoshop would run better. I had 256, and tried to upgrade to 768.

Bad idea! The DIMMS matched the motherboard specs exactly, but the board would not recognise them.... so.....

Refusing to give up on the RAM upgrade, I decided to go ahead and change motherboards.... which also meant I needed to get a new CPU, too. So I upgraded the machine from an Athlon 1.1Ghz with 256MB RAM to an Athlon 2500+ (1.85 Ghz) with 1GB RAM. Monster. Grrr.

Well, Grrr not so much from power.... which it had and ran fine under Windows 98..... UNTIL the machine was turned off and restarted later.

Bad VMM32.vxd? Argh!!!!! Windows 98 errors with this much RAM! What to do....?

After trying to tinker with 98 to get it to work, and a couple of really nasty hard reboots (in the middle of a grinding hard drive using virtual memory IT DID NOT NEED :P), my C: drive CRASHED. What the hell?!!! *sigh*

Back to the computer store again.... new 40GB Hard Drive, and a shiney new copy of Windows XP.... which I had been incredibly reluctant to upgrade to (very intrusive with Microsoft scanning your machine all the time and the bloatedness that comes with every new version of Windows).

That wasn't so bad after all! Windows XP IS bloated and intrusive, but after some research I learned to disable these features and get everything set up.... and this setup work nearly delayed page 52 of 2214 for another week.

Of course, 2214 somehow magically got updated on time anyway (but what's this about Omnitemporalis? On Hiatus? Christmas shopping is to blame. That and the full time job. Things will get better.) No whining.

So that's a tale of my great adventures in updating the 1337 B4WX. By the way, it FLIES. PH34R 17. Photoshop has never run more smoothly.

But that's bad luck to say that. I'll post again once I recover from the next imminent disaster that follows praising my computer. *cringes and waits for a crash*