He's been having increasing computer woes for months. The new machine he built in June has had problems since the beginning and has gone through 3 mother boards and 2Gb of additional RAM before it threw a silicon shoe and came up totally lame today. (His screams of frustration as it has plotzed over and over for no discernible reason are gaining legendary status.) He tried swapping mother boards and checking the RAM, running various tests as he tried each iteration.

It's just plain fucked.

MB #3 has proved to be craptacular just like 1 & 2, though in new and different ways (and normally neither of us has any complaint with Asus boards.) So... after the morning and afternoon had been spent on laundry and office work, we went out to Frys Electronics with the avowed intent of buying him a new computer. Got one, brought it home, went to install the graphics board... and the new machine has a slot, but no power for the board. Needless to say we shall be returning said machine tomorrow before they close for the New Year's Eve craziness, but Mr. Kat is a bit... nonplussed.

And I am frustrated at having gotten no new work processed today (I was aiming for another 10K revised, bringing the revision progress to 70%) and unhappy that he is unhappy. I'd sneak off behind his back and go and buy him a new one, but I don't know enough about Linux computer requirements to get what he needs (though I have been looking hard at the options at System 76... though the one I'm tempted to buy is $1100 and that may be overkill).

Woe!

I'm aghast: I'm watching my mail client download the mail. I checked 30 minutes ago and got 20 messages--mostly spam--now, I'm watching it download 4032. Yes. Four-thousand, thirty-two. I may be sick....

Yeah, OK, so... I'm being acquisitive. Yesterday, it being both Labor Day and the last month of this fiscal quarter, I decided to pretty up by laboring environment by buying a new laptop. I didn't actually need it, but I wanted it and... well... petty as it sounds, I felt the need to keep up with the hubby on his WoW-playing ability. Yes, I'm nuts.

But maybe not so nuts: World of Warcraft is one of the few things we actually get to do together at the moment. My travel and writing schedule and his on-call schedule mean we pretty much don't have a lot of free time together on weekends like normal people, but with an adequately fast machine, we can hang out and have adventures in virtuality, at least. My original iBook laptop was not bought with games in mind, and being the last of the PowerPC G4s it wasn't exactly cutting edge even when I got it two and a half years ago. It was blazing fast compared to my old desktop machine, portable, and cute. And being an Apple with OS X its operating system was close enough to Mr. Kat's Linux expertise to make him a decent emergency help desk, but not close enough to tempt him to play with it while my back was turned (as he used to do with my Linux machine, causing me frequent upset and lack of productivity.)

Switching from my old Linux box to the first Apple was not the simplest thing in the world, but it wasn't horrible, since I didn't have a lot of exotic Microsoft files to move or applications to port. I'd kept my files in basic formats like rtf, ods, jpg, and txt which were mostly moved gracefully. I lost some apps, but there were decent Apple things to replace them and I have been Windows Free ever since--not a slam on Windows, I just don't seem to have the right mindset to be comfortable with the Windows environment and it annoys me when I have to use it. anyhow, the original port over took a couple of days of intermittent mucking about.

But the new one? OMG! Apple has made the migration of files, apps, and User prefs/info utterly simple and fast. Plug in a $20 Firewire cable, poke the right button combo, and the machine does the rest. Really. The system took less than two hours to transfer everything and once turned on, it acted exactly like my previous machine. But faster. And prettier. And with a much wider, higher definition display. And better speakers. And it weighs less! And this is the base model with the "slow" 2.4 GHz processor and 256 video card. Well... and 4 gigs of RAM.... All around, it's a huge Box o' Win!

Except that the original Power PC Calendar Widget for the Dashboard doesn't work on the new Intel Core 2 Duo chipset and there's nothing to replace it. :( I miss my little "desk calendar" thingy. But aside from that? The new MacBookPro is fan-fuckin-tastic!

Yeah, yeah, I really don't need the high-end graphics and sound; I don't need the bigger screen or the bigger hard drive and double the RAM. But I like it. A lot.

Prrrretty....

And I can run WoW with everything turned up to max and it's still blazing fast. Hehehe....