God, I love Windows. No, really.

Only decent power we get in this area of the house comes from an extension cord from the other room. Seems the cats have managed to run over and yank the cord - not so it's completely out, but partway there... So, I'd be sitting at the computer, doing whatever, and it'd work. Walk past, down the stairs (shaking the floor a little - it's not a stable house,) come back and... WTF, the computer's off? Turn it on, work on it, go to the bathroom... it's off. Reboot, go into Linux to see if it's just something in Windows. Well, that's working... head out to make dinner. Come back, it's off. Play with APM settings. Doesn't help.. but it does screw up Windows. And since this thing's running XP, well...

New install. Wipe out Linux (which I barely use, no time to learn or figure out its quirks at the moment) so I have a fresh partition and can save the data on the old one. Wife complains that she's losing network connections about the same time (through a hub.) Great... power problem. Plug the plug back in, everything's happy... except me, who now has to do a 35 minute install. Plus, since this is the second time in 30 days I've had to reinstall, I get to sit on hold with Microsoft to activate Windows. Yay. (Can't complain, it was a quick call. Still, activation still strikes me as a bit... well, of a pain.)

Anyway. So now I'm back up and running, at least. And on the Great Driver Hunt again.

Think my next system will be at *least* an eMac. I really want to play with OS X, and I've liked Macs for a long time... I have some older ones around (Quadra-era) and have a blast with them, but you really dont' want to try to get online with 'em, you know? Whenever I get that, email's going over there (virus? Ha!) as well as most website stuff. Games? eMac when possible, PC otherwise. Yeah, I'll keep running both.