My latest jones, and some serious rambling
I really, really want a new computer.

The one we have now is a piece of shit. It's about five years old which makes it an antique in Moore's law time. It has a Cyrix 166 processor, 96MB of Ram, two hard drives totalling about 11GB. The last time I re-installed (crappy) Windows 98 I partitioned the drives into about five different logical drives so I'm often moving stuff around to free up space. I thought it made sense to have separate drives for me, Gerri, and the kids. I put the OS on one partition, and also created another miscellaneous one. I don't ever remember smoking crack, but this makes me wonder.

At one point I had it set up to dual-boot Linux, but I trashed that. I'd love to move to Linux, but I don't think Gerri would be thrilled. She fears change. I have Linux running on my laptop which is currently living in my closet. The good news is I bought it old and used off of Ebay. The bad news is it has a 1GB hard drive so I can barely make it fun.

Actually the biggest problem is that my home network doesn't so much work. I have DSL through my phone company - a small non-Bell former co-op. Instead of a cable/DSL router, they gave me some kind of funky modem with only one connection. I've got it running into a hub with all my (two at the moment; three if I haul out the laptop) computers hooked into it, but I can only have one on the Internet at a time - my ISP doesn't do DHCP anymore. I've got a fixed IP. (uh, I think) I think if I had an open PCI slot , I could throw another NIC in it and maybe get something going, but all my slots are full on my Win98 machine and I don't really want to mess with my Mac - an old 9600 with a 133 MHz processor (I think) that I got for $40.

So, you see, all my problems will be solved when I get my new computer that I really, really want. It'll be:
* faster
* more stable with XP
* better for networking, 'cause XP is
* more capacious - I'm thinking at least a 40GB drive
* ready for another NIC so my home network is really a network
* generally cooler 'cause it's new

And then I plan on turning my current clunker into a bad-ass Linux rocker. Or something like that.