Dilemma Solved

I got this new computer and it's really great. It starts up in under a minute! I even dual-booted it last night with Fedora Core 4 64-bit edition, and the boot loader works like a charm. At startup, I can choose whether to boot Windows or Linux.

The only problem I see right now is the video. I have never been a fan of onboard video, but it made for a good affordable motherboard, and obviously works. I'm using it to view this editing session. The only thing is that it sucks. I can't even scroll down a webpage smoothly, or move windows about the screen without a delay and choppiness.

I'm surprised, though, that I can play a DVD and it looks just fine. But if I can't move my damn windows around, something's amiss. So I think I have solved that problem this morning. I ordered a new video card. It should be here next week, and I can install it at my leisure.

I'm telling you this because I really don't hang around people who care about this kind of stuff. I've got to tell someone, so it might as well be the common passers-by on my blog. That's what it's for, isn't it?

While I'm here, I might as well tell you about my recent upgrade. In 2001, I finally put together my first computer. I had done upgrades and teardowns and stuff like that before, but this was my first from-scratch build. I bought the cheapest shit I could find for this, too, since I was still in the Army and always short on cash. I bought the case locally ($40), ordered a cheap (and I'm talking cheap, $37!) motherboard, and found a 667MHz Celeron processor in Denver for about $50. I got the memory, network card, and video card from the same local place as the case. Later I got the sound card at Best Buy.

I got home and put it all together. It finally worked, and I enjoyed it for some time. I had actually built the thing to play my flight simulator, but I was silly in thinking that a 667MHz Celeron could do that. Anyway, there I was.

It finally went into retirement mode when I got my laptop two years later. It really became a file and print server and never got put to use after that. When my laptop started showing its age (and my wife started using it for school) I was seeing a need for a new desktop, but I didn't want to spend the $2K for the one I wanted. I decided to upgrade my existing system.

This was very easy with the exception of buying the parts. I don't ever want to spend money, but I found this sale at a shop in Valdosta and got a new motherboard with onboard video, sound, and firewire, an AMD Athlon 64 processor, and one Gigabyte of RAM for about $350. That was all I needed (until today). I got the upgrade done in about an hour, loaded Windows x64 Edition in about another hour, and I was set. I loaded Fedora Linux last night, and everything is working out.

I better get to work. Someone's got to pay for this.