Fucking XP crashed last night. Really scared me (again) because I’ve lost my XP partition 4 times and saved it about the same number of times. Randomly, my whole PC will just reset as if the power supply reset. Also randomly, my PC won’t boot. Before it gets to the boot menu it just says *Disk read error. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del.*

Although I keep fairly good backups, this is supremely annoying. I booted off my XP cd and ran a chkdsk /r which fixed the problem for now but I was surfing dell.com on my mac laptop (which works flawlessly). I use my PC for XP and Linux. XP for games, Linux for productivity. If they had PC games for Mac, I’d switch and just own Apples.

PCs are stupid. But they’re cheap. You can’t beat it. I’ll continue to own a PC. But I really don’t want to buy a new one. Here’s why I’m going to live with it and/or not live with it:

*Deal with it:*
It’s relatively fast and I’m at work all the time.
P4 2.8ghz
ATI 9800 XT
1Gb RAM
84gb IDE HD
73gb IDE HD
200gb IDE HD
Sound Blaster Audigy 2

*Don’t put up with it*
No SATA drives, suck
USB 1.0, sucking with iPod syncs
No fireware
No ‘hardware’ RAID (motherboards these days use fake hw raid)
No gigabit LAN
No 800+ FSB
New chipset are really fast
No PCI Express (although this is new)
No hyperthreading
Power supply is weak

Dell.com have some sweet machines and Dell builds them quiet. I have never bought a prefab box but Dells are nice. The problem is, I don’t need to spend $3000+, nor do I want to.

WAH!