Status Report

Case: Aquired
Motherboard: Aquired
Processor: Aquired
Video Card: Pending
Wireless Card: Aquired

I assembled everything using parts (power source, hard drive, CD/DVD and floppy drives) that were still working and compatible with the new board. The snag I hit was that I'd never checked to make sure my video card would fit the card slots on the board I compared everything else to. And it doesn't. A bit of a fatal error, and just the kind I'm capable of. >.>

The good thing is, I now have a new and relatively functional computer. It just doesn't have any video device for me to be able to see anything I'm doing. But I've already bought a new card, and it should be arriving soon. Then, provided everything works okay and I don't have to make use of warranties, I can actually work on projects (like this one) that I haven't been able to do much with in the sparse moments I get to use someone else's laptop.

Also, as Jake got to witness, the microphone on my headset died. I'll have to pick another one up soon. That's something like five microphones I've gone through since we set Ventrilo up, yeah? Good stuff.

Added bonus: We're probably going to be switching internet providers over here. Comcast has been set up to automatically charge the cable bill to our bank account, but they've been choosing not to do so. Instead, they've been letting two or three months worth of bills accumulate, then charging the account and charging us late fees.

Recently, they haven't been charging at all. We've checked the account several times to make sure the money was there, and it is. Even if it wasn't, the account's set up so that bills will hit the savings account if there isn't enough in the checking, and we know there's plenty in the savings.

So they shut our service off under the pretense that we haven't been paying our bills. We've called and royally bitched them out over it, but we're tired of dealing with them. If they didn't hold a monopoly over the cable internet in our area, we'd go to another cable provider. Instead, we're being set up with dish TV and hopefully nice, expensive satellite internet. Haven't researched it at all, but satellite is supposed to be pretty fast. Not as stable as cable's supposed to be, but our cable was never in a state I could really call 'stable'. I could probably post a great wall of text on how I feel about Comcast, but most of it would be rather... Uncouth.

In any event, Dish Network is set up to come and install things on Wednesday. Internet is on hold, though, until we really decide what we want and what we can afford. It's in my workweek, so I won't be at home to know what happens. Thankfully, our neighbors generously forgot to secure their wireless connection, so I'll still be able to check up on things here. Since it's so busy here and everything.

Everything else is too slow or too expensive, so we stuck with Comcast interwebs. I don't get anything out of Dish TV because I don't watch television very much. I can, however, assume that it's better than cable after observing the way everyone else in the house can watch it for much longer than anyone bothered with our old Comcast cable television. And how it has several thousand channels to the eighty or so Comcast presented us with. Because the amount of channels essentially determines the size of the television service provider's (and perhaps the television owner's) penis.

More importantly, though, I'm posting from my new computer. Looks like it works fine. In fact, Windows registered properly and everything. I haven't been able to get anything off of my old drive, though, which is disappointing. I can't even get the new computer to recognize it unless I make it the master drive, in which case the computer can't boot Windows properly (since the motherboard is different from the board I used to install windows onto that hard drive). It seems to be working fine in every other aspect, though, including wireless internet.. Which means that I won't have to borrow someone else's laptop anymore and won't be restricted to when they're not using it. I'm always amazed by how great a new computer runs before it's all bogged down by viruses and fragmented files.

Now then, I'm going to go spend a few hours installing things so I can actually do stuff.