So I ended up taking a bit of a post-holiday blogging vacation, though it wasn't planned. Things got extremely busy, as they often do, during and after Christmas. But what also delayed my return to the web was one of the gifts I received: all new insides for my computer!
I had been complaining for a long time about all the annoying little problems I'd been having with my old hardware. A somehow video-related lockup problem had me engaging in rituals to boot my computer... rituals I'd gotten so used to performing, I'd almost forgotten they weren't normal. But after watching me do my rain dance one too many times, Chris decided it was time to do something.
So... (drum roll please) I now have a dual core Athlon 64 (each core at 3 GHz) with two - count 'em, two! - gigabytes of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. Also a new souped up NVIDIA GeForce 6800 video card. Or at least souped up compared to my old one, which is pretty sad considering the new one was only $30. About the only things left from my old system are the DVD burner, the power supply and the case.
The reason this actually kept me from blogging? Well, once I knew I had this fancy new computer, I wanted nothing to do with the old one. But it took a while to find some time to actually do the transplant. We finally tackled it on New Year's day, and ran into some minor snags when trying to copy data from my two old hard drives onto the new one. I shelled out $30 for drive imaging and backup software to do the job, and it copied the first drive (the one that Windows lives on) just fine. But when it came to the larger drive where I kept all my applications, data, media and documents, it kept stalling out. It sat at about 80% completion all night without moving, and when I restarted it the next morning before work and checked it at lunchtime, it had stalled at about 20%. Now I'm not going to name the software I was using, because I actually like their product and just am not really sure what's to blame for the problems. Anyway, I ended up using Bart PE, which is a live Windows installation on a bootable CD, and copying the drive using the plain file manager built into that. A little over an hour and it was done. So again, seems a little strange that a plain no-frills file manager had no trouble copying what a drive imaging product could not, but I just don't know where the fault really lies. Once the copying was done, I still had to repair Windows (so it would work with all the new hardware) and play the update, reboot, update some more game. This all took a few days since I couldn't call in to work "busy fixing my computer".
And then, I realized that I hadn't yet put up a January masthead for confoozled.com, and I couldn't very well post a January entry without a January masthead... so my new computer's first official job was designing the new header. And now that it's done, here I am! Back to bore you all out of your minds... 
![[photo of me]](/glasses144.jpg)
![[album thumbnail]](/photos/halloween2008/thumbnails/albumthumb.jpg)
![[album thumbnail]](/photos/redsox2008/thumbnails/albumthumb.jpg)
