sooo tired

Well, spring break '07 is over.
Alot happened. Don moved into his new mansion house, it only took a few days. Don got married. Don had a St. Patrick's day party.
Are you seeing a theme here? I spent most of my time at Don's house, both old and new. There was a very large amount of alcohol consumed and even more furniture moved.
On the plus side Don got a new TV so, as promised, I got his old TV. It is sitting very nicely in my living room surrounded by grudginly rearranged furniture. It is a beautiful 47" of 1080i goodness. Unfortunately the 4 year old set does not have an internal HD tuner so I still don't have HDTV, but the standard def cable looks good enough to me and I mostly wanted a bigger TV, I can wait on the HD (and by wait I mean I will probably order HD cable by the end of the year). DVDs look nice with my progressive scan DVD player (thanks C&E), and I am going to go buy the component cables to get the Nintendo Wii hooked up and using 480p as well (then maybe I will be able to tell the difference between a 6, 8, and 9 while putting in Tiger Woods Golf).

Needless to say it was a very full week of not-schooling and I am very very tired and still unusually sore. I want to go take a nap but I am afraid it will screw up my sleep schedule even more. The goal is to get to bed tonight around 9 pm and hopefully that will allow me to get up in the morning feeling rested enough to stay awake during classes. I find it really helps my knowledge retention if I am conscious when I receive the knowledge.

Its that time of (2) years(s) again.

Well, its come time in my computer life to upgrade. My last major upgrade was 2 years ago, almost to the month. This time I will be getting a new CPU, GPU, and some more ram.
I started looking for socket 939 dual core processors about 3 weeks ago. It was alot harder than I was expecting. You see they stopped manufacturing the 939s in favor of a new socket type that allowed for faster ram (*not technically accurate but good enough for the point I am getting across). The remaining stock of the higher end chips has apparently been sold almost completely. After waiting for one of my many "auto-notify" emails to come in from an online retailer to tell they had the part in stock again I started calling around to the local stores.
Luckily this week Fry's Electronics got a socket 939 AMD X2 4600+ in stock. It was a return but, hey, its all ANYONE had.
I bought it and Tom came over last night to watch me install it. Well, about 5 minutes into the install I found out the probable reason for the return. A few of the pins where "tweaked. Thats not to say they where bent, but it looks like the pins may have brushes something at some point in the handling of the CPU. This caused to pins to be off center just enough so they wouldn't fit, but not enough to be easily noticeable by the naked eye. Luckily I am a trained professional (no, seriously) and was able to spot the trouble makers. About an hour of gentle persuasion, some fine tweezers, and some outstanding light holding by Tom and I was able to get the offending pins back into proper alignment.
For those interested, Windows had absolutely no problem with the upgrade. First boot detected the new CPU and loaded the appropriate APIs. Once the new drivers where loaded I rebooted and "presto magico" I was rocking dual cores.
I have notice increased responsiveness in my system, especially when I am doing things like watching streaming video on one monitor, browsing the web or doing email or reviewing homework on the other monitor. (Did you like that run on sentence?)
More importantly there is a large gain in performance when playing Supreme Commander. This game is freaking awesome and probably the reason I haven't posted in a while. It a HUGE RTS and it can get very CPU intensive. I would say it is probably the most CPU intensive game on the market (its surprisingly easy on the video card and still looks great with low settings).
I will be upgrading my video card to the Geforce 8600 when they hit the market in April (17th). When I order the card I will probably get another gig of ram. This will bring my new system specs to:
MSI K8N Neo4-F Motherboard
AMD X2 4600+
2 GB DDR 400
Nvidia Geforce 8600 (ultra/GTS)
2x250 GB Western Digital SATA hard drives (raid 0)
19" LCD
19" CRT