… comes another hellaciously crazy week.
Work stuff keeps coming fast and furious, with replanning of older projects that have slipped going alongside new projects hurtling toward us like orbital kinetic weaponry.
On the home front — I’m beginning to remember why I ended my theatrical career in college (or, perhaps, why my girlfriend insisted I do so), as the Cotton Patch Gospel takes up my non-working waking hours as if I had entered a monastery. Line running and rehearsals every night this week, culminating (praise Allah!) with the actual performances on Friday and Saturday night (7 p.m.), not to mention Sunday afternoon (3 p.m.). Y’all come now, hear?
(We did a demo of one of the songs at the announcements at church at two of the services, and it was extremely well received — which was gratifying, to be sure.)
I still have a tremendous amount of work to do memorizing stuff. Rrg.
Margie, btw, is being very supportive of both endeavors (work and “play”). Many kudos to her. She even understands my need to stay up late (but not too late) playing CoH when I get home at night.
The only weekend activity not otherwise documented was going computer shopping for Margie. Between the 512Mb limit, and some unhealthy fan sounds, and general slowness and congestion, her old Vaio is reaching the end of its useful life in our household.
Biggest annoyance here (aside from contemplating the eventual transfer of data and reinstallation of programs) is that the nice new graphics card we got for her PC will almost certainly not transfer over. That’s because it’s an AGP-slot card, and the industry is shifting to PCIe, and you can’t find new machines with AGP slots.
Rrg.
Poking around here and there, I think it most likely we’ll go for an eMachine and buy a PCIe nVidia card for her. At Jackie’s suggestion, we looked at Dell, but, frankly, the price comparison isn’t there. I don’t need any fancy bells and whistles, and the eMachine I was looking at will do the trick just fine. Total price should be around $800.
Plus, of course, actually figuring out the time to get the frelling thing installed.
And so it goes.
Ummm…
Dave, stay away from emachines….really.
The one my mom baught…it’s one year life.
Failed Power supply: Sent back and replaced.
4 failed hard drives: sent back and replaced.
So out of the one year that she had it, six months of that time it was not in the house.
Talked her into getting a rebuilt Dell. Nothing has failed on it yet in six months.
My rebuilt Dell. I lost one memory stick, upgraded to 1G memory. Intel video card incompatible with CoH i5, bought a new nVidia card and love it very much.
Ummm…
Dave, stay away from emachines….really.
The one my mom baught…it’s one year life.
Failed Power supply: Sent back and replaced.
4 failed hard drives: sent back and replaced.
So out of the one year that she had it, six months of that time it was not in the house.
Talked her into getting a rebuilt Dell. Nothing has failed on it yet in six months.
My rebuilt Dell. I lost one memory stick, upgraded to 1G memory. Intel video card incompatible with CoH i5, bought a new nVidia card and love it very much.
You’re repeating yourself …
The flip side is that we picked up an eMachine for Margie’s folks two, three years ago. Never a single problem. Not that they’re power users, but the thing is up pretty much full time.
I’ll do a bit more digging, though.
Review (and consumer reviews) of the eMachine in question here. Also here. Most of the complaints (cheap speakers, no TV tuner, small included 15″ monitor) are not an issue for us, and we already expect to upgrade the graphics card.
Here’s a site with plenty of complaints about eMachines. On the other hand, the site also has a lengthy list of Dell complaints.
The techies at Engadget seem to be psyched, and have a fair number of comment testimonials as to the eMachine.
Shrug.