Corsair RAM is in

Well, even though I think I stabilized the G.Skill RAM as I had no crashes in the past 2 days, I've decided to go with my better judgement and use the Corsair. Sorry G.Skill, but after the initial headaches, I'm not going to risk it. All it's going to take is one blue screen while Jen is watching House Hunters International, and the entire project gets scrapped. Besides, with the $40 rebate with the Corsairs, it's nearly the same price.

So, after last night's TWC fiasco, I had to resetup my QAM channels and HD guide. Just finished that and all is running smoothly. I ripped 10 movies onto the hard drive last night and decided to go with Vista's DVD library. My Movies was just too slow. Everything else on this machine responds instantly, but going into My Movies was taking a good 15 seconds. Hopefully, Brian will get off the .net 1.1 platform and go to something a little faster with the next release. The Vista DVD library, however, is pretty sweet. Responds just as quick as everything else in the UI, is simple to use and has some cool features. Basically, I just ripped the entire DVD onto the HD, leaving the VIDEO_TS structure in place, and bam...you've got the movie. I left the extras on some of them, but mostly just went with the raw movies. Nero does a pretty good job of compressing with little to no quality degradation. I suppose I could just rip everything in mpeg4 format and save a bit more space, but I like having full surround sound and the menus add to the WAF. We'll see how quickly I fill this HDD up and then make the call from there.

For tomorrow, I'm going to install Orb. If all goes right, I'll be able to stream the Masters to my desk at work when the broadcast starts!

Last night I got remte desktop working, enabling multiple sessions. This allows me to drop this machine headless next to the TV and work on it remotely whenever needed. Another step in the right direction. At this point, the only thing missing is the RMAed NVidia 7600GT. I'm going to give that card another shot. This ATI is nice, but its Windows Video Performance numbers are 4.6. Initially I thought that was pretty sweet, until I saw people posting about mid to high 5's with their 7600GT cards on The Green Button. If I can gte a 5.5 out of that, this would mean that the bottlenext on this machine would be the AMD 64 Dual Core 4600+ processor! How sweet is that!!

DAMN this machine is quiet!