Ahhh – this weekend just so happened to be an “Upgrade Your Computer” weekend…can life be any more frustrating fun?!
It all started out with a beautiful, new video card that was purchased with some leftover birthday money from my Grandpa (thanks again!). For some reason, the video card was the one thing that mysteriously got left out when I built my new machine last fall, possibly because somehow I believed that a 64 MB graphics card was “good enough” and possibly because after everything else, I’d kind of ran out of money! Either way, this was certainly an improvement – AGP 8X integration, 256 MB on board, and even potential for dual DVI outs once I score that huge contract and can afford a couple of 24″ LCDs…
I still haven’t even bothered to run any games on the thing to push its limits – I don’t really have time to game that much anyways – but it was nice to see that I’ll actually be able to watch anything that I want to download off bittorrent once again (my old card just couldn’t keep up with the latest DiVX codecs anymore). But of course, after a few hours of letting the downloads fly free, it was brought to my attention by one of those stupid, little taskbar bubbles that I was almost out of disk space on my last free drive. Fortunately, though, luck be with me today as a quick trip to hot-deals.org revealed a truly hot deal, indeed – 200 GB for a mere fifty bucks at CompUSA…and needless to say, I was there lickity split!
Mind you, the drive was more of a pain because first I didn’t have any free power cables (had to disconnect a CD drive that I never use anyways), then the disc tool was trying to limit me to a 137 GB partition because my BIOS was out of date…and my floppy drive wasn’t working to install the update because I was stupid when I first built the computer and put the cable on upside-down (…oops…), but as of now the new drive is spinning happily with the rest, files are getting shuffled to prepare for a new onslaught of television premieres, and all is right with the world. Well, close enough anyways…
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Oh yes, but I can’t end this evening’s tale without sharing my latest infatuation with the group – I met her at CompUSA this evening and I’m not too shy to admit that I think I’m in love… :O
http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=117&modelid=9870
…that’s right – she’s a printer…what did you expect?! This beautiful work of art prints at up to 13″ x 19″ with 4800 x 2400 dpi, utilizing a whopping 8 ink cartridges, and cashing my credit card out at $500. No, no – I didn’t buy it just yet because I don’t really have the space…or the excuse…or the spare change, but just think of how cool the latest episodes of Ink, Paint & Tears… would look printed out at 13″ x 19″ – sweet doesn’t even begin to describe it! Ok, so maybe not right now, but if we ever start to look like we’re going somewhere with this, it certainly could be fun for promotional stuff…we’ll see. And by the way, as far as paper is concerned, photo paper for this beast is a buck a sheet for matte, two a piece for glossy. Has anybody ever seen reams of paper that size??? I don’t know about you, but I’m psyched!