A Post on a Saturday? Are you feeling okay?

I'm writing from my newly rejuvenated machine, with its shiny fresh new motherboard. The transplant took place from 10:30 to noon this morning, and thankfully went without a hitch, as in a fit of devil-may-care attitude I decided to proceed without any backup or other preventative measures. Heh. %-D

I also decided to give up overclocking along with the new-board installation. Overclocking is the art and science of running a CPU at higher-than-rated speed (usually requiring higher-than-rated voltage, and fair amount of twiddling with extra case fans and other temperature-regulating measures), which in my case transformed a middle-of-the-road 700 MHz machine to an 800 MHz mini-monster, saving me approximately $200 at the time, and dramatically increasing my hardware-geek cachét among the initiates. The computer ran fine in this condition for approaching two years, but the price was obvious when I got a good look at the old board, post-extraction. All the capacitors on it -all of them- were swollen, and several had actually begun to leak some sort of slag. (For the tech-innocents among my readership, think of capacitors as power-smoothing batteries.) I'm not at all confident that the board would have successfully cold-booted a single additional time.

So I've removed the overdriving daughterboard from the Athlon CPU, and the naked chip's tooling along quite happily on the new motherboard at its rated 700 MHz. It's not generating nearly as much heat as it did while OC'd, and truth to tell I can barely notice the 1/7th drop in performance. Besides, I'm used to the firebreathing 1.7 GHz machine at work nowadays, so I've been "low-rent" at home for a while now. :-)

So is anything else going on?
Well, yeah. I finally got some maintenance done on the car today: lube job, air filters, valve replacement... Bought some new pants at Jacques Pennay...

Doofus! Don't you have a social life?
Well, I did converse with an actual human female last night...

That's better.
Well, "converse" might be a bit strong. Longtime readers know that I keep a profile over at Match.com, and wonder of wonders the profile generated a hit! The first in a long time. Suffice to say we IM'd for a few hours yesterday evening (at long last, a fellow night person!), and are meeting for coffee Tuesday night.

Goddess, you may begin planning your lament. Or purchasing plane tickets, whichever. ;-)

-Rich