Sorry I've been in contact very little for the past few weeks, I've been having some computer problems.

Brenda wanted a new computer, and the one I was currently on was still really viable for things like playing games and so forth, so she came up with the idea of me getting a new one and just passing mine on down to her. Sounded like a good plan to me.

Initially I ordered a dual core AMD64, and wasn't too impressed. The AMD64s are backwards compatible with 32bit OSes, but if you do install a 32bit OS on it, you're pretty much not getting all your money's worth seeming as you paid for a 64 bit processor but it's only processing 32bit code. My plan was to dual boot Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Ubuntu64. Both of these gave me more headaches than the speed boost would be worth.

I installed Windows X64 and right away noticed that the generic display driver (ie the one it uses before you install your actual driver) was slow as dog ass (windows were slow to update and left momentary artifacts on the screen when you'd move them), and there were these weird, random areas on the screen where text was blurry. My next step, of course, is to download my video driver to correct this, so I go to install my wifi network card driver and find that it just doesn't work. An hour and countless message boards later I find that Netgear doesn't make, and has no intention of making, a Windows x64 compatible driver for my card. Ok, well, my ethernet port seemed to work so I strung a wire across the house to get my driver. Upon downloading and installing my NVidia driver and rebooting, the update and artifacting issues were solved but the weird blurry spots were still there. I tire of fucking with Windows so I move on to the install of my Linux partition.

Pop in Ubuntu 64, run through the install, and have it up and running in no time. Go the Wiki entry on how to upgrade to the latest Firefox and run into a whole mess of side notes about needing to do all kinds of other hairy bullshit if you're running 64 bit. Most of it about Firefox reporting your OS which causes plugins to tell you they're not available for 64 bit platforms. There was a hacky work-around that got you past it, but the aggravation was already starting to build up. Also, the win32codecs that allow you to play things like WMVs and AVIs just weren't available for 64 bit systems.

At this point I had had enough of it and came to the conclusion that if I was this aggravated in the first 2 hours of having the machine, there was very little hope of me ever being satisfied. I realize I could have just installed 32bit XP and Ubuntu, but like I said earlier, any money I would have spent on the processor being 64bit would be wasted. So I sent the fucker back and ordered a Pentium4.

Upon receiving my P4, I whipped Win2k and Ubuntu on it with no problems what so ever. Until, of course, I had used it for about three hours when I all of a sudden rebooted on me out of no where. Back up, couple more hours later, reboot. To make a long story short, I had gotten a bum motherboard and had to send that back and get it replaced. Now I'm finally up and rocking