V for Vendetta: On Quinn's advice I went to see V for Vendetta. It's a really good movie (great-ish?). Starring Natalie Portman, Stephen Fry, John Hurt, Hugo Weaving (although for all you know the actual acting could have been done by anyone, maybe even one of those old ladies from a depends commercial...because the person always wore a mask and hey, that cape could have covered up the bulges from the depends...but the VOICE was Hugo at the very least. Anyway, go see it or rent it when it comes out on DVD

Hamfest Motherboard Update: Tests SEEM to indicate that I have 3 boards that work. The REALLY NICE board however doesn't seem to like my Applebred duron right now. I think I have a fix, more on that later. The old Compaq board I was going to use at work SEEMS to be ok, but it's hard to tell because I've had power supply problems. The PSU that came with the crappy little case I picked up at the flea market probably wasn't enough. The replacement that I was going to use in it was questionable (more on that later). There's one more board...under one of the PC Chips names (PC Chips makes a bunch of shitty boards for other companies) works fine. Heh, it's not that PC Chips boards don't work, it's just you can't expect them to go one tiny bit beyond their design specs...and frequently they don't manage that. But hey, if worse comes to worse...the board WORKS. I may actually end up swapping around some stuff later...installing the Applebred duron in the HTPC and using the Athlon XP in the "spare".

Bad Capacitors: Back to the power supply thing. I opened up the questionable power supply and the main caps (the ones that filter out the input) had obviously been leaking. I replaced them with a couple I removed from an old AT power supply (they had the same values). The PC stopped resetting at random but there may well be other bad caps in the PSU. It's so hard to know. There were a HUGE number of motherboards and power supplies from a couple years back that went bad. I've also replaced caps on motherboards for the same thing. I hate to think how many other bad appliances and other misc gadgets are out there. Basically anything made a couple years ago that uses a lot of power and electrolytic capacitors is vulnerable. I wonder how many of those super-expensive Plasma TV's went bad because of that. Of course, plasma screen TVs aren't really even considered durable goods. Their quality drops so much after 5 years you have to get rid of them.

Applebred Duron Support: After much experimentation I have noticed a pattern with my applebred duron. Boards that SHOULD have questionable support (ie, shouldn't know WTF it is exactly) DO support it...while newer boards DON'T. I also had a problem with one that stopped supporting the CPU even though I know for a fact that the CPU still works. I'm pretty sure that the problem is...bad support in the newer BIOS. Because the faulty BIOS information is in the original BIOS software that the manufacturers then modify for their own boards...support for applebred durons probably disappeared from ALL newer boards. I'm going to try downgrading the bios to a much earlier version to see if that fixes the problem. That would *fingers crossed* make the board NOT properly recognize the CPU and just leave it at whatever settings the duron would normally use.
Update: I was looking at the base of the CPU REALLY closely and saw a tiny strand of wire wedged between the pins. I guess the old board that the chip worked on didn't have anything connected to the pin that was causing problems. Anyway the CPU is working fine again and has booted into windows at 2.5ghz! I'll probably just run it at 2.4ghz...which I'm guessing gives it athlon 3000-3200ish performance.

New Graphics Card: After a lot of thought, I've decided that instead of upgrading ONLY my video card. A new motherboard and CPU is just too expensive...so I'm just getting an AGP card. I know...it costs a bit more to get an AGP card but *shrug* it's the cheapest way out for me. I'm not made of money. I've pretty much decided on the Radeon X800GTO. It has a good amount of memory, enough power to make use of it...and it's not TOO expensive. Sadly, I'll miss out on the hardware physics revolution for now. I would have gone with a Radeon X1600, but it's too wimply. Thought about a Geforce6800GS, but it's too expensive...and everythinge else reasonably priced uses PCI Express :\ Such is life.

That's all for now. So, until next time...ummmmm ...bye