HAPPY NEW YEAR! 

New Motherboard:  A friend got me a new motherboard...WOOT!  It's not the best overclocker but it's not so much for the overclocking as it is for...getting me over the technology hump painlessly.  Right now I've got all this hardware...an AGP graphics card, DDR2 memory and, if I wanted to go with a Core2Duo, I'd need a new board anyway (old board doesn't support it even though it's a socket 775 board).  This has DDR/DDR2 slots, AGP/PCI express and supports conroe.  Anyway, as I said, it's not the best overclocker (hoping it's just a setting I haven't found that needs to be tweaked) so I was going to try to get a bit more out of it by raising the core voltage of my processor.  This board doesn't have VCORE (remember, it's not to help me overclock, it's to help me upgrade later) so...I had to manually set the VCORE with modifications on the CPU pads...which brings me to...

Partly Fried CPU:   I partly fried my CPU. After several attempts to set the VCORE, I connected the wrong bits and *silence* dead processor.  Wouldn't boot either machine.  I'd already set up my spare computer when I thought...hmmm, maybe I just fried the trace on the chip that connects the voltage control pins...so I set the voltage manually again, but this time instead of making small changes I just set each of the 6 VID pins. (by covering them with tape or connecting them to ground with conductive ink).  WOOT!  It works!  Anyway I'm all the way down at 3.1ghz now because the board's unstable at higher speeds (limited it at 3.4ghz on the other motherboard because the PSU had problems supplying enough power to THAT board).  It works, it's not really THAT big a drop in speed.  On the other hand there's the driver issue...

XP drivers kick win2k drivers' ass!:   WOW!  I took this opportunity to switch to XP and between driver optimizations for my games in the new drivers (yes, Nvidia and ATI both have their software sense the application and tweak the GPU settings) and the new driver features (and the fact that last month I opened 33% more graphics pipelines that had been locked at the factory)...performance has skyrocketed.  I had nice performance before, I have great performance now (compared to what I was used to anyway).  Oblivion at great framerates with AA enabled at 1280x1024 .  Just tried Doom3 again today...and after informing the antivirus software that there was no need to scan the gigabytes of data every time the game loaded anything...I ran it up to 1280x1024 and ran up AA...and it also ran superbly.  BTW, can't help but notice...Doom3 makes WAY better use of dual cores...not that it's needed these days.  it'll use 80% of my CPU's time while oblivion can only manage 55%, occasionally 60%.