Well, finished putting the box together last night, and Rae says, "Please don't turn it on now, it's late."  I reluctantly agree, knowing that if it doesn't work, I'll be up all night trying to make it work or wondering how to fix it and can't do anything about it anyway, so I go to bed with the satisfaction that it's all put together.  Fire it up this morning and voila! it works!  Mess with the BIOS settings a bit, install Windows XP, and now I'm in the process of installing a few programs I know I'll want - FireFox, ZoneAlarm, AVG Anti-virus, WinAmp, iTunes.  I'll post from the new box as soon as it's secure and I don't have to use IE.

Spent the late afternoon and a couple more hours this evening putting the box together.  I think I'm finished.  I think I've actually done it.  I'm too tired to mess with the BIOS stuff tonight, so I should be able to finish it up tomorrow morning while M is at gymnastics (with mom and grandma).  Hopefully in 12 hours I'll be posting from the new box!

Ups shippment

There they were, sitting on the street behind the UPS truck, waiting for the UPS man to come back from who knows where to deliver them to Rae's office.  I sat in front of her building, watching the minutes tick buy as I waited for him to deliver my stuff, staring right at my boxes, wanting to just go up there and take them.  Finally he came back from delivering next door, and I asked him if there was any way I could sign for the boxes rather than following him upstairs just to have to bring them back down.  Since he knew Rae and he saw my name on my badge, he knew I was who I was, and he let me sign.  Yay!  So yes, I've got all the pieces, now it's just putting them together.  Hopefully I'll be able to start this afternoon.

Yeah, so the hard drive on our 5-year old Dell finally crapped out (not before we got all of our data off, barely *whew*) and we contemplated replacing or fixing the drive when Rae suggested that we just get a new machine.  Taking advantage of this, I started watching the newspaper ads the past couple weeks to see what was out there that we wanted to afford.  The Big Retailers had an HP box on sale for $360, and we like Rae's HP lappy, so we focused in on that one.  Thing is, neither Rae or I are all that wild about Windows Vista, and after talking some with a buddy of mine, he suggested I build my own.  He and I figured that I should be able to build a machine that was as good if not better than the off-the-shelf HP, AND I could install Windows XP.  We talked quite a bit on Thursday, me reading and researching processors and motherboards and the like, and asking my friend a ton of questions, and at the end of the day he convinced me that I could actually do this.  After talking with Rae some more, I decided to set my research sights on building a new box.

After quite a bit of reading and researching and looking at newegg.com for prices and specs, I settled on the following:

• APEX TX- 381 Black Steel MicroATX Mid Tower Computer Case ATX12V 300W Power Supply - Retail
  

• GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM-S2H AM2 AMD 690G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
  

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Brisbane 2.1GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Processor - Retail

• GeIL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Retail

• Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

• Microsoft Windows XP Home With SP2B 1 Pack - OEM