I've been quiet for the past few weeks. Work's required a lot more of my time in preparation for a shipment and I've been busy building my new PC! I built my last one back just before Windows XP launched and, while it still very useful as a file server, it's starting to breathe a little hard when I ask it to perform CPU intensive tasks. A 1GHz AMD CPU, 512M of PC133 RAM and an ATA100 IDE interface is still nothing to sneeze at even though the magazine writers would have you think otherwise but I'm due for a failure sometime and I'm afraid that'd be sooner rather than later.
So, what did I put together? An ASUS A8N-E motherboard that comes with SATA2.0 and ATA33/66/100/133, 10 USB2.0 ports, on-board AC97 8-channel audio with SPDIF output and PCI Express. I've stuck in an AMD64 PIB Socket 939 3500+ CPU, 1GB of DDR400 memory, a NEC ND-3540A DVD writer, an eVGA e-GeForce 6200 TC (you're right, I'm not a gamer), all housed on an Antec Sonata II case.
I've moved it downstairs, next to my old-school TV that has an actual picture tube (yeah, I'll replace it one of these days) and use it as my media hub. Matter of fact, right now I'm listening to Radio Paradise, an Internet-only radio station with some nice visuals from J. River's Media Center playing on the TV. My cable modem connection is upstairs in my old computer room and I haven't run Ethernet downstairs yet so I'm making do with a Linksys WUSB54GS USB 802.11g adapter, at least until hardware is available that can move data based on the new HomePlug AV specification which, from what I hear, will be sometime early next year. Yes, I'm going with Ethernet over powerlines.
So, anyway, that's it. I've missed telling you that T-Mobile is supposed to be getting the HTC Tornado sometime in October, that Microsoft has released SyncToy 1.0, how to decode the UPC symbol, why "colonel" is pronounced "kernel" and a lot of other things. Sorry for my lack of attention. I'll try to do better.