Offline...brb

Hey everyone. No photos from Washington uploaded yet, I did get them of the cameras but then my new motherboard arrived and I decided to put my upgraded system together. It's up and humming but I haven't put everything back on it yet, like Outlook and our photo archive. So bear with us, no email replies from us for another day or so.

One of the main reasons for the upgrade was the switch to 1080i video, I couldn't even edit it with my old Gfx card as it had only 128MB of RAM. My new card has 768MB, nice! It has 192 time more memory than my first 386 computer had total. I just got Studio reinstalled last night and man does it cook on the new hardware.

Quick summary for the geeks, an E6600 o'clocked from 2.4 to 3.4Ghz (nice and stable with just air cooling, sweet), 2GB of PC8500 (1066Mhz) DDR2, a screaming new Geforce 8800 GTX and lastly 1.1TB (yeah a terabyte) of usable storage in RAID5. I don't think I'll be upgrading again for a few years :-). My 3DMark2006 is just a hair over 12000, more than 15 times faster than my old hardware, and I haven't o'clocked the Geforce yet.

Our new Xbox 360 arrives tomorrow, another eBay buy, and that will replace our old Xbox as the home media hub. Again it's needed for HD, the old Xbox just doesn't have the grunt to decode HD video. Although, to be honest, I'm more looking forward to getting Guitar Hero 2 and playing that over the weekend, rock on!

Andy, out.