It’s unfortunatly been raining and really nasty outside here in the big H for the better part of two days now. That’s put a bit of a hurt on my case painting. It has however, motivated me to actually assemble the components of the computer itself. They’re all resting quietly in my case, snug in their new homes, happy and working together quite nicely. The installation was a breeze. The new socket AM2 stuff is really quite easy to assemble. My only problem is that the motherboard only has 1 IDE chain. I have 4 IDE devices. For those of you who haven’t built a PC in a while (or ever… you crazy Mac people), you can only have 2 IDE devices per chain. So, I’ve ordered an IDE to SATA converter widget from NewEgg which should solve my troubles until I upgrade the optical drives. The hard drives will probably just stay on their IDE chain until I trade them out for newer, larger drives by years end. At the moment I have 1 hard drive and 1 DVD drive hooked up just for the sake of installing Windows. A process that, while relatively error free, should be 150 times easier.

I’ll never quite understand why I have to patch, restart, install a service pack, restart, patch, restart, service pack again, restart a few dozen more times and finally validate, patch, validate, install and lastly restart. What the fuck? Slipstream people. Slipstream. Get this into your troubled little West coast brains… I want to “update” my copy of Windows ONCE! Roll all those updates and patches and whatnot into one mega package. Work out your fucking problems with dlls, restarting processes and services so that I don’t have to restart 40 friggin times! If you need to, make it into a big pre-OS install package, I don’t care. Have it run at bootup so that no processes are getting in it’s way. I have a copy of SP2 on a disk and even that required updating before I could use it, as well as updating after I installed it. I want to walk away from the machine, and when I come back a few hours later, it’s happy and ready to go. Is that really too much to ask? Oh… and I don’t want you to sneak any “we’re trying to protect you by running this obvious spyware program in the background” bullshit in there either. I want a list of stuff you’re going to install and then all I hit is “go” and it’s done.

And I don’t want to hear any “If you used a mac, you wouldn’t have to patch” bullcrap either. While that may be true in the short term, you won’t catch me shelling out every other year for a “new operating system”. Sorry, but 10.whatever is not “new”. It’s a patch. A patch you’re paying for. Unless it goes to 11 and it makes candy poop out of the CD tray, it’s still just an upgrade.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I had a long day. I had to get up a 5am to get to a shoot on time. I’m a little cranky. I need a nap.

Seriously though. I want an operating system that doesn’t suck. I think, after 30+  years of computer innovation, we’re fucking owed that much. I don’t care what camp you’re in, there’s things that suck about both operating systems.

*sigh*

Anyway, Windows is behaving for the time being. Drivers are being installed as we speak. With any luck, some sort of game might actually be playable in the next day or so. I’ve got the deepest need to dive into Team Fortress.

If it’s ever proper painting weather again, I’ll get back to my case. Until then, this skeleton looking, barebones, loud as hell case full of fresh and tasty parts will be keeping me company.

Matt out… someone get me a drink…