I’m currently in a gentle grassy meadow, surrounded by cartoon popups, neon blue curtained windows and a dog that pants endlessly when I ask him to look at my hard drive and find my slippers… in short I’m in XP Hell.

Dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, I now have my new motherboard up and running with USB 2.0, a gig of primo 3200 DDR RAM and that 200gig Seagate HD I picked up for $99 doesn’t hurt the rebuild either. And so, my last excuse for not running Windows XP Pro went away the minute Sean and OCZ got that RAM to me.

The rebuild went easy, save for frying one of the 3 USB headers. That’s what you get for trying a proprietary USB/Diagnostic panel on a different mobo to hook up more USB ports. Hehe, my bad. I’ve spent a few days tweaking it and except for a minor quirk on shutdown/startup that’s VERY intermittent I’m extremely pleased, excited and totally loving my newly refurbished box. That new motherboard is sweet!

It’s fast, it’s zippy and I’ve made XP a LOT less cartoony. I haven’t installed everything under the sun in case I have to re-install XP to get rid of the intermittent start/shutdown problem but so far I’m in geek heaven researching XP to all hello and back. I LOVE troubleshooting!

So that’s what I’ve been up to folks! Now excuse me it appears I have to play another game or two, to uh… er… troubleshoot some more. Yeah, that sounds right… *waves*

Thanks guys!