What's Up?

If I wait till I have a lot of time I will never write anything!

In the news, some of my English cousins (of Irish decent of course) were over visiting. The above picture is Lucy Brennan - my first cousin Helen's daughter. Lucy is studying acting. Helen, Lucy, Stephanie and Michael were able to visit DC where we met them. Unfortunately, the weather was 62 and rainy. At least they felt at home! It was great to see them.

Danielle made a gutsy decision to get chickens. So now we have "Inferno","Flower" and "Goldie". You can guess which one the boys named. :)

The tale of two computers. If you are interested in putting a computer together read on. Otherwise, talk to you in the next blog.

I decided two months ago to upgrade my old 5 year old computer. So I bought a motherboard that seemed to be pretty popular - Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe Nvidia. Unfortunately, all my choices were not as good. I bought a AMD 3200 and cheap memory and CPU cooling fan. I put it together and everything worked fine. But the cooling fan broke while I was away and the children were playing a game called "Far Cry". Every time the motherboard shut down the computer because the CPU was too hot. They would simply turn the computer back on. Needless to say this fried my CPU. I ordered the same CPU and could not get the computer to work.

So I figured the motherboard may have been damaged too. I bought a DFI Ultra Infinity motherboard. Put everything back together and it still did not work. I started reading about memory. I came to understand that these boards demand good memory so I bought 1GB of Corsair 3200PT. Put it on the DFI board and still did not work. I joined the DFI Bulletin board to find some expert help. Boy, the folks on the forum were great. They really helped but I still could not get the thing to work.

The problem was that the processor was only theoritically compatible with the DFI motherboard. The truth was that very few people had any success. The DFI guy, code name, "Angry Games", was really nice and agreed to have me ship him the board and he would get it going. So I shipped off that board and Corsair memory.

In the meantime, I decided to give my Asus board another try. I took the board and installed a 2500 M AMD which I had heard was a solid processor. I did not want to buy any more memory so I took my cheap memory and slammed it in. Wala, it worked! The computer has been going for 2 weeks without a hickup.

When I get back my other board, I plan to give the kids one of the computers.