Both of our desktops are acting up real bad, and I’m beginning to think it is time to replace them.

Nadia’s WinXP computer seems to blue screen randomly when Media Center starts to record. When it tries to boot up again, an error about needing to put in the system disk comes up on a black screen. I have no idea how to begin troubleshooting this problem.

My Vista computer suffers from random IRQ-related blue screens. The only constant when they come up is that I click the left mouse button. The mouse is new, so maybe that’s it? Then again, these blue screens started months ago when I bought my new video card.

Then there is the annoying issue with Live Photo Gallery which will no longer import pictures from my SD card from the Autoplay window. I’m pretty sure this is related to the most recent Windows Update, and these guys seem to think so too.

Oh yeah, the Home Server I mentioned in my last post? It still backs up my PCs, but I can’t get into the console (the main application for the server) anymore. I can’t remote desktop into any of my computers using their names, I have to use their IPs. That’s a new issue, which came up after the most recent Windows Update.

I had to shut off Windows Media Player sharing (so my 360 can see music on my PC) because it crashed frequently and Vista told me about it all the time. COM Surrogate is crash-happy as well; sometimes it is video that causes the problem, but sometimes it seems random. Opera will crash once in a while when I try to close a tab.

I’ve got this neat Vista Sidebar gadget that lets me control my volume with the mouse. It would be better if it didn’t hang so frequently, forcing me to remove it and put it renable it.

That reminds me of the Logitech SetPoint software that came with my MX 5500 Revolution keyboard and mouse combo. Most of my keyboard’s functions are dependent on it, but it can only run well for a few minutes at a time. It then lags; keys and buttons clicked take many seconds to actually do anything.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. While I’m an MS fan, I’m finding it harder to defend them when my computer has become so unreliable. My birthday is coming up, and I toyed with the idea of going over to the Mac side. The high cost is the primary factor keeping me away from doing that.

This place is just full of “creative people with money”. I think I would have enough content to post one every day for over a month.

The first time I saw one of these beasts, I was in shock. I tried to explain what I saw to Will and he couldn’t believe it. There are at least 5 of these rolling around post and we saw 3 of them in the PX parking lot today. Brace yourself for quite possibly the worst kind of vehicular molestation:

We missed the opportunity to get the third one (or maybe we were lucky that we did…).

Will and I had a brief discussion about where this was popular and who this was popular with. East coast and west coast mods are pretty easy to define. This has to be some mid-west home brewed experiment gone all kinds of wrong. I could only imagine what would happen to this car in New York…California may be a little more accepting.  As for who…we all know this is something only my brothers and sisters could come up with.

Hopefully, this trend will only be found here in Colorado.

I didn’t think I would have an update so soon, but these awful rims was spotted yesterday in the Commissary parking lot:

Just one of those things that makes you say WTF?!?!?!?!