v2.0 - Are we there Yet?

Morning Folks

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Sorry for not getting my musing out yesterday, but I was home sick {cough}.

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Bleh, I didn''t have time to stop for my Timmy''s this morning as I was 30 minutes late for work apon waking this morning. Luckly nobody is around until around 7am so I made it just in time :)

Anyway enough about that, on with the musing!

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How was everyone''s weekend? Well, we celebrated Easter in our household this weekend. It was a great time and we enjoyed watching the excitement on our kid''s faces as they awoke Sunday morning to find the Easter Bunny had visited our house.

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This year we picked up the kids a little something extra above and beyond the regular Easter chocolates and such. For my son, we bought him his own copy of World of Warcraft which made him really happy. For my daughter we bought her an Atomic Betty action figure. Both kids loved their presents and the chocolate. My son, how has had bad experiences with Easter chocolates, devoured several boxes and eggs this weekend. I thought for sure the kid was going to be sick, but he pulled through it alright (so far) other than a few quick sprints to the washroom :)

My daughter, on the other hand, didn''t fare as well and was awakened in the middle of the night with a stomach ache :) Ahh the memories to tell them when they are older.

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Also this weekend Katie gave me my Birthday present a little early :) My Birthday is a week from last Sunday btw. I was quite surprised with my gift as it was totally unexpected. She picked me up a Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT! Needless to say I was quite happy with the gift (at first) and was more than happy to upgrade her video card with my old ti4200. Not much of an upgrade for her as she was running an FX5200, but it was a minor upgrade and she was grateful. She got her Birthday gift early this year as well :) More on that later.

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The Video card is MASSIVE and for whatever reason didn''t like my exsisting installation of Windows. At home I''m running an AMD Athlon XP M2500 Barton. Nice CPU which I had overclocked to 2.4GHz. Well, my new Video card didn''t like to be running at such a high bus speed so I had to clock it back to 2.1GHz. After doing that, the system just didn''t seem to run properly at all. End result, I had to rebuild it from scratch. Not a huge deal as I like to do that on a regular basis. This is why I only keep my OS install and installed programs on my C:\. Everything else is put on a different drive to make rebuilding the PC less painful for backing up stuff :)

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After getting the system rebuilt and working, I went through a few pains to get World of Warcraft reinstalled. I''m not sure what is up with that, but my drive would not read the media at all. In the end, I had to copy over all 4 CDs (which was shared out by Katie''s PC) to a directory on my drive to run the installer. What a pain that ended up eating 4-5 hours of my day. I did finally get online though and proceded to crank every single graphic detail I could find in the game. I was not disappointed ;) The game runs flawlessly on my new card with everything turned on max while playing WoW. I was like a kid in a candy store to see it all working and in such high detail.

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As I mentioned earlier, Katie too received an upgrade of sorts. Basically I replaced everything internal on her PC minus the CD Burner and Hard Drive. I picked her up an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ and a new Motherboard plus 1Gig of DDR3200 Memory. She is loving her new upgrade which has increased her speed quite a bit. Previous to this she was running an AMD Athlon 1800+ with 1Gig of PC133 SDRam. Not so exciting, but it got the job done. I''m happy when I look over at her screen and don''t notice any choppy graphics. That used to drive me crazy when we played DAoC and now she has 0 chop. Happy times for all :)

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What are we doing with the left over stuff you ask? :) Well, this is going to become my son''s Birthday present at the end of April. Yes folks, we are building my son his very own PC to play WoW with us. The system won''t be anything super, but it will be Katie''s old internals mixed with a brand new case we already picked up.

http://memoryexpress.net/ProductDetail.php?DisplayProductID=4061

Check that out. Katie and my son will have the exact same case, while I went out and spoiled myself with the same case but in a different color.

http://memoryexpress.net/ProductDetail.php?DisplayProductID=3687

Nice cases and they came with 420Watt power supplies. Great for future upgrades and they are super quiet despite the 5 fans that came with them. There are two fans on the Power Supply, two fans mounted on the inside back of the case and then one fan mounted on the side panel. Sweet cases :)

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So that was my weekend in a nutshell. Spent way too much money and was rewarded with smiling faces and some good gaming :) I couldn''t ask for more.

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Well gang, I need to bring this to a close. I was a bit late for work today and I have been side tracked twice already this morning. Makes for a confusing musing I know, but it fits with the way my mind works ;)

Have a great day and see you tomorrow.

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Cheers,

Al