Ooh, that last post was #50. Whaddya know. That puts me at about one post per week, since I've had this thing for about one year.

I love having 3 monitors... there's just a whole wall of glowy computerness on my desk... and I'm not building another one after all, either because I'm too lazy or because my old desk works - I'm not quite sure which it really is. So, one could argue that I should work on the basement with dad for a bit instead... and I probably will, I guess.

Supreme Commander is a very interesting game. It's very advanced, with native support for dual monitors (Woohoo!) and multi-core processors. It's a very large-scale game, too... as many reviewers have said, it's more about strategy than most other RTS games, because there is so much space.

Cedar Point on Saturday was crowded... but otherwise good. We went on the front seats of Millenium Force. That was DEFINITELY worth waiting 1:45.

And... that's all I can think of writing right now.

So, let's see... Oh, that's right, I was supposed to write about Spiderman 3. It's hard for me to describe this movie. It is one of the first movies which I could not remember well. I'm not really sure if that makes it good or bad or neither - it moved around a lot between various stories, and I didn't think there was a tremendous amount of continuity between these stories. Well ok, I guess that makes it a bad thing. The special effects were good, though. And I'm not saying the story was bad, either. It was a great plot and whatever... plenty of drama, action, and occasional comedy. But for those who have not yet seen it, I'll not say more.

In other news... I've spent way too much money this week. I bought a 22-inch (widescreen) LCD monitor. It's supposed to come today. I also bought my season pass for Cedar Point - I'm going this Saturday, next Wednesday, and a few other yet-unscheduled times this summer. Now I need to build a desk that can hold 3 monitors and a laptop with room to spare (Can't have too many computers... right?) I'm convinced that there is no furniture company that makes exactly what I want, and I think it'd be fun to try doing something like this by myself anyway. But we'll see where I get with that. I also got something else, but certain temporal circumstances prohibit me from discussing that subject.

So, Vista did actually install that time. (Finally...)

I spent most of the first 2 days after that working, and/or installing WoW and various other games. Throughout all of that, aside from several dozen (Yes, I mean at least 25) messages asking me if I was REALLY sure about installing that game, or if I thought it might rip out Vista's internal organs, I couldn't tell that I wasn't using XP with prettier windows. I wasted no time at all getting rid of the "Windows Sidebar" (a.k.a. Mac Widgets for Windows) and shutting off various other resource-draining things that Windows assumed I'd need. I was relieved, however, to see that there was no Windows Messenger bugging me every time I started up.

If you asked me what I thought of Internet Explorer 7, I could only tell you as much as I saw when I was downloading Mozilla Firefox.

And then I tried to reorganize the Start Menu. EVERY TIME I tried to rename something or move something, it asked me if I really wanted to do that. After all, if I renamed it, that would just be bringing out a welcome mat for all sorts of terrible viruses. (?) At that point, I got sick of closing those windows and shut the User Access Control off. Who cares if some little piece of spyware figures out what websites I go to - it's a lot less trouble than closing 50 pop-up windows every day.

And so from there, I moved on to hardware issues. All my CDs that came with my hardware had drivers for XP, but not for Vista. Vista already installed drivers for my graphics card, so that was fairly convenient. However, finding and downloading the drivers for both of my audio devices proved to be a little bit more irritating. Not just because Windows goes crazy whenever you have more than one hardware option for sound stuff, but because the websites of the companies I had to get the drivers from were complete junk. Just, eww. But I eventually found and installed those, and got everything (even my microphone) working again.

So, overall, what do I think of Vista? Well, I'll sum it up in one sentence:
Vista is XP + (Pretty Graphics) + (Mild Foolproofing) + (Copied Features from OS X)
And, this is pretty much what I figured it would be.


Moving on... my spring break was way busier than I wanted it to be. Somehow, I ended up working a bunch for the first 3 days of the week. Oh, except on Tuesday I went to dinner with Sarah and the Tatums at Chipotle. I now know that it is NOT smart to get the sauce they call "hot". And we were going to see Amazing Grace, but Andy was in a random mood so we say Night at the Museum instead. Then I had to work more on the same old volunteer project on Thursday, but had a little lazy time later on in the day. On Friday I had the morning to do nothing, but then I went to help my mom do a big mass mailing thing. After that I had a LAN party, but it didn't last all that long... everyone had left or fallen asleep by 5:00 AM. Today I slept until 11:00, and then spent most of the day being lazy and/or doing nothing of significance.

Woo hoo. One more day of break until school. Gee, I can't wait to get up at 7:00 AM on Monday. *groans*

Aside from working for 9.5 hours, all I did on my birthday was... hmm. Install Windows Vista!

My 120-day trial of XP was running out... days counting down to 0 more quickly than I could keep track of. And so, last week, I ordered Vista (Home Premium version, but who's counting). Well, it came today. I was going to give a little presentation at work about building computers (remind me to think about who my audience is next time I do that) and so I had my mom run by and drop off the package, but it was too late for me to install it first to show it to the people. Unfortuate. Or so I thought at the time.

Then I left work. The family (minus dad, who is in Europe this week on some kind of fancy business trip) was going to go to Steak and Shake or something, but it was already closed. Go figure... at 8:45 PM on a Monday. Oh well. So after that little detour, I returned home to try to get Vista to work.

I backed up my files to one of my other hard drives. Or, well, technically, to a small piece of all three of my hard drives in this computer. But anyway... that's roughly $250 of game CD keys, music from iTunes, and things of that nature. But the money aside, I did not really want to have to mess with setting everything up again. I copy all my game install CDs to the hard drive - much faster to install them that way. At any rate, I ran the Vista installer from within my current version of Windows. It got kinda far along, and then it asked to restart. So I comply.

BOOM! Blue screen of death!
(restart again...)
BOOM! Blue screen of death!
(mess around with the motherboard settings for a bit)
BOOM! Blue screen of death!

Ahh... a glimmer of hope? Vista didn't die when my computer restarted at this moment. Yeah, I'm writing this as it tries to install Vista again. But anyway, back to my story.

At this point, I had given up on that installation. So I tried to somehow get back at the old files to make sure they were still intact. That wasn't working. Ohh, back to realtime: here loads Vista. Ok, I'd better cut to the chase...

So after much tinkering with components, I "borrowed" the hard drive from my previous computer and booted Windows off of there. I was able to salvage all of my data. Then I tried many more things to get Vista to work, with little success. On a hunch, I eventually got back on and set up the hard drives more simply (converted them to basic partitions, did away with the software RAID) and isolated all my important stuff onto one hard drive, leaving the other 2 completely blank. So then I installed Vista again, and it seems to be working this time. And that's where this story ends for now.

And here's my desk, after all of this:


To be continued...

So, I got around to ordering my next gaming PC. Yeah, I know I just bought a car a month ago, and a laptop 2 months ago, but... yeah. I'm done buying big stuff now. (Or at least that's what I claim at the moment)

For anyone who cares, here are the numbers:
Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) at 2.4 GHz
4x512 MB of DDR2 800 Corsair RAM
eVGA 512 MB nVidia GeForce 7950GT Graphics Card
3x160 GB SATA HD (for a RAID configuration)
Case is a "Cooler Master Ammo 533" (it looks like something you'd carry a weapon in, pretty much)
And, 500 watt Antec power supply

And, Newegg.com is the best thing ever.