I have returned to the States, journal people! I was pretty down about it for a few days, but time and diving into this year's trip diary helped move me along. I say this every time I come back, but that's because stuff truly gets better every time I come back—this was the happiest and comfiest trip Caby and I have had yet. Never met anyone I'm just that well matched with and attached to, and I still miss her guinea pigs and watching Red Dwarf in the lounge and time spent cuddling and days out and nights out. Even little stuff like running to the Tesco in the village for meal deals is better when it's with her, or I have her to come back home to.
I do have to return home at some point, though, so let's celebrate the good of being back as well! I did miss my setup, but as I wrote back in early July, the eMachines Box's hard drive gave it up again. I decided that, if I was gonna be in here replacing a drive, I would upgrade the whole thing, not just replace it. To that end, I went with a modern 256GB Silicon Power SSD, a mounting bracket to take it to the correct size in the drive cage, and a StarTech IDE-to-SATA adapter.
There's some tricks and things you gotta do to keep XP running nicely on an SSD, mostly making sure your partitions are aligned properly (which the Windows 7 installer or a modern version of GParted can do for you). This is actually dual-booted with Windows Me, which I picked over 98se because it upsets people. (Plus I just wanted to see Me running on real hardware.) That's worked great so far, but it needs drivers, and this chipset never natively supported 9x, so I haven't toyed with it much. Truth be told, the moment I got Media Center Edition going, I just started installing games and programs again and haven't looked back at Me, but at least it works and I have the dual-boot going.
Anyway, the results have been excellent! Even though IDE is obviously a bottleneck, the computer has been way zippier running off an SSD than it did even with the 7200RPM Caviar drive I replaced the 5400RPM one that it came with. Unreal Tournament loads so quick now, it's great. You see the XP boot screen for literally like three seconds now, and you're at the desktop like seven seconds later. So speeeedy. (Not as fast as piggo, but nothing is as fast as piggo.)
I should get to playing some games now, shouldn't I?
Oh, and do watch this space. The journal's looked the same since 2022 now, and I think it's about time for an overhaul.
Tagged under: tech
