I had hoped to spend this evening writing up code for a website that I want to try to rebuild over the holiday weekend, or at least part of a website, but instead I spent pretty much the whole darned thing playing computer updates … and I’m still not done! My desktop PC is the one that really needs the most attention – figure I built it in the fall of 2004, if my memory serves me, and I’ve yet to reinstall Windows once. It’s gotten really bogged down and downright buggy, but we certainly don’t have the cash to replace it right now, so I spent this evening downloading driver updates and a BIOS update and all of that fun stuff. I’m even turning Automatic Updates back on for Windows … clearly I’m desperate here!!!
Although that attempt is probably a waste of time, I figure anything to speed things up at least for a couple of weeks. I found a nice, small (160 GB) hard drive on newegg for only $45, which I think would be a good investment because the hard drive in this one has gotten really loud! If I can just replace that and the fan for the CPU (should be cheap, too), and then put a fresh install of everything on the new drive, I think we should be able to limp by for a while longer. That, and I want to add another 1 GB of RAM because I learned while playing in the BIOS that it hasn’t been running on Dual Channel for the memory since I added a new 1 GB stick who knows when (I first started with 2x 512 MB modules). The memory probably won’t provide a huge performance increase, but I do like to have lots of different stuff open at once so who knows.
I still need to get the wi-fi working so that the laptop picks up a signal better than 30% twenty feet away, but that’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Happy ID4!!!