The internet hates me...

My internet connection at home died without a word last night around 8 pm.  One second I was connected, the next I'm wondering what the hell is going on.  No amount of reboot or reset would help and after a couple of hours of this, I gave up and went to bed. 

Today, I am resigned to going home and calling the ISP provider.  I'm going to investigate the ability of my old computer to connect with high speed, because honestly, I'm tired of waiting an hour to DL a ten minute chunk of video.  The problem will be the computer....

I sense Murphy's Law ahead waiting to fuck me over.

Buying Trouble

I have decided to try and sidestep Murphy, whether or not I'm successful... only time will tell.

There is a new beast lurking nearby, waiting to be unleashed on my desk once all the bits and pieces of import are saved from the old workhorse and moved to the external hard drive.

Okay, so maybe it's more a feral animal than a beast.  Today, I went out and bought an Acer AM3300-E1222 desktop to replace the ancient AMD Athlon XP 1500+ that has occupied the tower space under the desk for the past six or seven years.  The old horse is ready for pasture, it has 1.30 gigaHertz with 1 GB RAM and 150GB hard drive space that's only about half full, a dead CD RW drive, a floppy disk drive (yes, seriously), 4 USB ports and Windows XP upgraded from 98SE upgraded from 95.  It was Franken-computer!

The new critter is an AMD Athlon II X4 620 quad core processor with 4GB memory, a 750GB hard drive, with a DVD RW drive, all the ports for the usual memory sticks, eight USB ports and Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.  It is a middle of the road desktop computer that will do all I need it to and then some.

As badly as I needed and wanted a new computer, I am not looking forward to trying to transfer all the old files over to the new one.  I suspect a great many of them will just continue to live on the external hard drive.  The most annoying part of this will be backing up the email system and then trying to integrate it with the new version.  The second most annoying part will be downloading all the add-ons like Trillian etc.

Here we go again.