How did it get to be November so quickly?

Returned from the state of Maine (my daughter got married in October) and within 2 days, my boot drive died. I did not lose any artwork parameters (thank goodness). The hard drive that died works here and there- I can plug it in for 10-15 minutes before it starts going psycho... so i've been debating whether to move all my mp3 files or simply to rip them from my cd's again. about half are wma, half mp3. For a while, my older 1Gb mp3 player handled wma's with better quality and smaller files, but now on my iPod nano, it takes forever to convert them, and I am eye-ing an i-Touch for X-mas <G>... it would be nice to catch up on all the stuff stacking up on the DVR while I commute to work on the train.

I am participating in a UF 5 round robin on the UF newsgroup currently and am looking forward to some time for fractals when the RR is over and I finish installing software on the new rebuild.

That was not as easy as I thought. The guy at the microcenter told me that PATA was IDE.... duh... couldn't get it to recognize- I head back during lunch hour two days later- he tells me the new standard is 80 pins- asks if I have a new cable?. My IDE card (that I installed to use my older drives when I ported from my 4.25GHz to my Duo Core-)... was to the old standard- so I figure a new cable is not the only problem getting this drive up and spinning. I end up buying a IDE to SATA converter for $12 and Voila- Windows can initialize the drive and off we go. (Why did I buy the IDE- because I am going to run the 4.25 with a KVM switch)- was getting files ready for the transfer. I can render on two machines... or operate at full speed on one while rendering on the other.

Anyway- now I figure I will do the opposite on the 4.25GHz machine - either install a PCI card for SATA and run SATA drives, or use and SATA drive with a converter to the old IDE standard....

Every time I think I understand hardware- they go and change it on me. <G>

As far as Windows 7? not yet. I'm thinking as long as I have this new rebuild- heck, I might even go dual boot, linux or Ubuntu...if I can get UF working in that environment.