Janauary 5, 2005

Well, my first post of the new year!  Last year ended on such a sweet 
note with my Windows computer dying a horrible death.  The CPU fan began 
to die, and somehow it took the hard disk with it.  When I did get a new 
CPU fan installed, Windows XP stilled choked during boot, failing on 
some driver.  It really didn't matter since the disk was running quite 
loudly, and I no longer trusted it anyway.

So my wife and I took a trip to CompUSA this past Sunday to buy two hard 
disks, one for the dead machine and one for the "new" computer (it's 
just an Athlon XP 2000+) my father brought me for christmas.  The Sunday 
ads said that they had 160GB drives for $70 WITHOUT REBATES!  I hate 
rebates so very very much!  Anyway, there were none on the shelf when we 
got there, which wasn't so surprising.  My wife saw a giant stack of 
Maxtor drives hidden behind a display and asked if they were the right 
ones.  I looked at them, but they were 300GB drives.  So i responded no.  
But then she began going through them and low and behold, on the bottom 
of the pile sat a pair of 160GB drives!  So we took them home and 
installed them.  

The old hard drive was actually intact once I began booting the 
computers.  it just didn't want to boot any longer.  So I copied 
everything off it last night.  All my data is safe once again.  Now I'm 
thinking that the 60GB drive will go into storage to ensure the safety 
of my precious data (old e-mail).  Not a fun experience.

On another note, I did try to put Gentoo on my new machine, but Gentoo 
was a nightmare.  Talk about unfriendly install.  After completing the 
install in three days, i booted the system only to be met with a kernel 
panic.  So I installed Debian "sarge" in about two hours and, other than 
the X resolution, everything is dreamy.  I love Debian!

Adios,
Jeff

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