I’m A Jinx

It’s official. I’m a jinx. I put together the new Windows XP machine last night out of a spare Athlon 2000+ that I had laying around. Well, I powered it up this morning to finish patching it and the CPU let the magic smoke out. Literally smoked the CPU.

So I went to Fry’s at lunch and picked up a 2.8GHz Celeron-D, a new motherboard, a gig of ram, and a new video card. No more used parts!

Then the real fun started. This was my first XP installation and I had to call Microsoft and read off a 48 digit number and get one read back to me in order to reactivate the installation. That’s just stupid. Maybe the next version of Windows can move back to a hardware dongle instead of this crap.

So it’s finally up and running and will be undergoing a burn-in for the next few days. Then the HAM Radio apps go on so that I can get the rest of the shack put together. PSK-31’s a must!