The end of "summer" draws near...
Thursday will be the first day of classes for the fall term. I'm taking 20th century music history, theory, bibliography, and a choral methods class/private conducting lesson to make undergrad credit count as grad credit and help me with my left hand.

I have an assistantship, yay, which is paying for half my tuition and gives me a stipend. Also means I get a little help with the school's student insurance which is really a pretty good plan.

Yesterday went up for the first grad conducting assistant meeting and helped put music in folders down in the music library and then went out with the other graduates and Dr. Wyatt.

Today I got up bright and early (7am) to help my sister and brother-in-law move his stuff from his old apartment to the townhouse and acquired living room furniture, a food processor, and a charcoal grill. Score! Also I scored a meal at Pizza Joint thanks to the wonderful couple! Thanks guys! We had blessedly cool weather for the morning, it only got hot around noon by which time we were done moving stuff. They have about a car load of boxes left to move (and then a lot of organizing at the townhouse!).

Now I am back to working on computers -- I took a look at the systems in my parents/my possession and realized that the Compaq desktop I got from my friend Mike a couple of years ago is far better than the two computers I pieced together for them (also Compaq sadly) a while back from other systems. 233Mhz vs. 1330Mhz. Yeah, time to upgrade them there. And their other system which I built some years ago and have upgraded a couple of times for them is a 1400Mhz system lacking only in ram.

I realized when I started setting them up that the copy of 98 wasn't going to cut it anymore since MS has discontinued even long-term support for that POS. So we have upgraded them to XP home SE. XP is really the only MS operating since DOS that I have had anything good to say about, and it is a really good OS imho. Much better than 9x, ME, or Vista. I almost bought a copy for myself to replace the Vista POS I have on this laptop. Instead I bought a 19" widescreen LCD monitor to replace my 10 year old CRT which is fading and flickering more every day. And a mouse to replace the one I broke in frustration with a computer a couple of weeks ago.

So anyway, I have gotten the system set up for the "new" Compaq including 512megs ram, a DVD player, CD-rw, 46gigs of HD and Win XP. Now that I have backed up the things we want to keep off the four hard drives I've been working off of I'm going to format the remaining two and install XP again, clean as a whistle. Rock on.

After I am done with this I will put the extra CD-rw I ended up with in their other system and put XP on it. The ram I ordered for that system wont be here until Monday so for now it will still only have 128megs. Sad.

Bye now, time to make it happen!
- posted by Nick @ 8/18/2007 04:42:00 PM | 0 comments