The way things work out ~_~;

Well, after the phone troubles got fixed up I was feeling a lot better - but since my lunch break doesn't coincide with babou's break (his hours are staggerred to be 1 hour earlier than me), we didn't get to hit the local shop today.

But well - for details about my phone-line and my oddball encounter with UG today, check out the FusionAce blog.

As for the lighter side of things that worked out okay in a strange turn:

Because I ended up leaving the office so late, I decided not to deal with the afternoon traffic and headed to the shop anyway. Picked up some new RAM. Finally - I now have matching clock speeds on both sticks - and I doubled my total memory today for a reasonable price (conveniently the shop was sold out of the matched-pair upgrade kits and they sold me two seperate sticks - which oddly enough turned out to cost less than the two-pack).

Anywho - above you see them as they were when I got home... and next to that you see them in the box. Also in the box you can see those l337 cables I bought last week. Wheee! Now if only I could do something about those power-supply wires dangling around near the bottom of the case.

So I booted up and noticed right away that the BIOS was now detecting a full Gigabyte of system memory... and in Dual-Mode! Yay! (that's supposed to mean it reads and write memory twice as fast because it's accessing both sticks in tandem per operation). But here's the catch - it was running the RAM at only 133MHz... this RAM is rated for 400MHz (and so is the motherboard)... OK.

A bit of reading later I smacked my forehead and realized that it probably meant 200MHz in tandem is the same as 400MHz total... (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong)... or maybe I'll swing by babou's office tomorrow and chat about it.

So I set the BIOS to reboot at 200MHz RAM speed...

What do you know but that the system becomes unstable. *smacks head again*

The whole thing freezes and then I reboot and get a message that there is no keyboard detected! Huh?

Well as luck would have it, many moons ago, a techie came by UG's office (we used to sit across from each other) and replaced her PC... the keyboard was... (I can't believe this) dropped into the waste-basket. Naturally, being the pack-rat that I am, I plucked it out and brought it home. It's a perfectly good keyboard. And who knew that years later, I'd be stuck with a messed up USB keyboard and had to turn to none other than a conventional keyboard ...one I'd gone through UG's garbage to get. ^_^;;

Now... gotta figure out if it was that clock speed thing or the USB that did me in... Hmm....