The tree is up, we actually put lights up (outside) this year when we had the 25 degree warm spell pass through and the presents are all wrapped. What more could you ask for.
We still haven't done the cards/annual letter for our friends and myriad acquaintences. Of course, it wouldn't be the first Happy New Year letter we sent out. Yes, we send a letter. No one has ever said, "please remove move us from the snail-mail spam", so we'll continue to send the family update. We have several college friends who do the same, and it's about the only way we keep track of who's doing what. So pbpbpbpbpbtttts.
I want to wish all you loyal readers a Merry Christmas. May God bless you and your family this coming year.
Part 3
Started putting things together night before last and discovered that the new motherboard has a 24 pin power supply requirement (up 4 pins from the last time I worked on a computer). So now, I'm the proud owner of a new aluminum case and power supply. Sure am glad the girls will appreciate it - I'm sure they will...they better!
Part 4
Last night I had all the new pieces into the new case, powered it up to install my new OS (thank you Micro$oft) and the new 200GB SATA harddrive is chunkin'. I'm talking a very audible chunk-chunk-chunk. There is definitely a seek/read issue here. Another trip to the store...
So I went and spent a bunch of money today. That's right, I bowed to the gods of silicon and purchased the equipment to build a newer, better, faster computer so I can run the Adobe Premier Elements package that I spoke about before.
They saw me coming a mile away. On top of buying a bunch of new hardware (motherboard, processor (w/fan), hard drive and 1Gb of RAM), it seems that I have to purchase yet another copy of WinXP. My favorite company has a license scheme in place that limits the number of machines a license can be installed on - one. The fact that the box is the same, but the guts are all different doesn't matter to them. It's all new stuff and the license doesn't transfer. So, I guess I'll donate the guts to another project I have going.
When I started this blog, I couldn't decide whether or not to put a copyright notice on the page. I just ran across this article. It seems that it is not necessary, but could save some hassle in the future (if I ever become a serious blogger with a serious following - which at this point doesn't seem likely). Besides, I mostly (try to) put stuff here so I can remember it down the road.
So I bought a cool new piece of software: Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. I was so looking forward to playing with it to convert a bunch of our home videos to a digital/DVD format. I even found it bundled with a $30 rebate - even more incentive.
I know Adobe products can have a bit of a learning curve. I've been using Adobe Photoshop Elements for a few years and I'm still learning it's tricks. I'm not quite as adept as others in Photoshop, but I have fun. Mostly I choose to spend time in other areas of my life.
That said, I sat down to install my new bundle of joy, which lasted exactly 34.2 seconds. I get an error that says:
"Your computer does not meet minimum system requirement.Adobe Premiere elements 2.0 requires a CPU that supports the SSE2 instruction set"
What! Although not brand-spankin'-new, my computer is fairly recent. I built it last spring based on an Athlon 2800. Lots of RAM and disk space as well. I have no need to upgrade. Besides, whats this SSE2 thingy. I've not heard of that. A quick trip to Wikipedia tells me all I dread to know. In essenence it says:
"You loser, you should have gone with the Athlon 64 when you upgraded last spring."
Oh, wait, what it really said was:
"...Rival chip-maker AMD added support for SSE2 with the introduction of their Opteron and Athlon 64 ranges of 64-bit CPUs in 2003."
So much for saving some money. To use my new software, I now have to purchase $500 worth of hardware and rebuild one of our two computers. Right now I'm leaning towards rebuilding the girls computer - less headache. However, it kills me that their computer is gonna be more wizbang than mine. Then there's the spouse factor - it may be my early Christmas gift.
I haven't even mentioned that Thing 1 is starting braces next week.
@#$%!
Sysinternals has some great utilities. I've used several over the years. I had, however, forgotten about this one. That is until I decided to clean off my work hard drive. Autoruns tells you what applications are kicked off at boot & login. A great little tool to see what is really draggin' your machine down.
FYI - no stray procs on my machine.
Came across this article today which featured a screen shot review of Microsoft Windows. Love it, hate it, or indifferent, it is the biggest thing that has impacted my professional life.
Somehow I missed the Windows versions 1.0 and 2.0. Interestingly to only a select few, I was in Grad school at the time and looking back, I believe they didn't think Windows was a big deal. We played with machines like the Sun SparcStation and the IBM RS6000. We even had an old Vax 11/750 hanging around. My last year there they put in a computer lab full of...NeXT workstations which later merged with Apple and formed the basis for Mac OS X. Interesting to say the least.
Anyway, I'll patiently wait for Vista to be released and again begin the upgrade cycle for all the hardware/software interactions that will be affected by yet another version of Windows.