It has been a crazy 2 weeks.  This weekend being MUCH better than last weekend.

Last weekend, between Friday night and Saturday, my main PC (the one I use for development, photo editing, game playing, etc) locked up.  I haven’t seen a computer freeze and lock up like it did for quite some time.  Reboot and no luck.  It was having problems getting past POST and if it did get past POST, it locked up on the screen where the XP logo fades in on boot up.  Lots of potty language later, I realized this was a heck of a hardware problem.

I ended up at the local computer store and snagged a new motherboard and processor.  Of course, gotta snag some RAM since my former rig was as ancient and the old RAM was either bad or incompatible (maybe it would have been compatible, it definitely would have been a performance bottle-neck).  Dual monitors?  Need another video card for that since the old one doesn’t fit any of the fancy-pants new AGP slots.  Also had to get a new hard drive, just in case one of mine died and a new DVD drive since all my gear is IDE and I was out of IDE connections for my existing DVD drive.

I replace it all and thought I did a great job.  The problem was still there!  WTF?!

After more trouble shooting, I determine it to be a 2 part issue.  The mouse really wants to be plugged directly into the box versus the USB hub.  Also, it would appear my USB LCD display (a little 4 line, 20 character display) is toast and appears to be the source of all my hardware problems.

Oh well.

That machine was at least 4 years old and an upgrade was about due.  It runs Word really nicely (think how fast WordPerfect would be!).

I picked up an Asus Netbook for Masha (Olessia’s sister).  It is a spiffy little gadget!  She will be able to use it to connect to Skype and call in whenever she likes (it comes pre-loaded and we tested it out and works nicely).  It was so spiffy, I got one for myself.  I’ve been able to toss all sorts of stuff on it without any problems.  I’m looking forward to taking it to Russia and using it on the plane.  I’m also looking forward to toting it around to class and using it for note taking.