Thereness - Interesting book dragon metaphor. I consider myself a book dragon more in the hoarding sense; I have a nice heap of story jewels in my lair. And I've been known to incinerate thieves...
Altoid97 - *waves*
Friday, finally, and Amazon's package tracker claims I should have my new used graphics card by 8 PM... which, given our slipshod delivery, probably means Monday, tomorrow being Veterans Day.
Okay, nose, you can stop nosing now... Either the Mobius bug is trying for another round, or that danged co-worker who's been sniffling all month has successfully contaminated others.
Think I'll hit Flonase, then head out the door... maybe after an Airborne. Dunno if it actually helps, but it's psychological...
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And it's Friday afternoon, slowly slipping towards evening.
Work was normal to light. We finished the load, at least, and got out a little early. Next week is probably going to suck, what with the holiday backlog compounding Monday's normal heavy load.
Got myself chicken strips for lunch. Yippy skippy.
No package yet, dang it. Not that I'm counting nanoseconds or anything...
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And it's even later, and I'm back on the big machine.
It's been a long, frustrating journey, but the upshot (near as I can tell, knock on plywood):
1 - It turned out to be the monitor dying, not the graphics card, though the old graphics card was very dusty even after vacuuming, which I can't believe spoke well for its longevity.
2 - It's a pain in the tail to get Windows 7 to acknowledge the temporary monitor I'm using (a Viewsonic it insists is a "Generic" monitor.)
3 - The new graphics card, a used AMD Radeon 7000-series, so far kicks tail and was worth the 30-buck investment now that I've got it working. Didn't think I'd see a difference over the 6000-series I was using, but boy do I... (Wound up using it to adjust the resolution; Windows insisted that "Generic Monitor" was only capable of the basic 640-pixel resolution, and refused to accept downloaded drivers attempting to inform it otherwise.)
Still have some fine tuning to do on resolution and contrast issues - Word looks fine, but having slight blurring issues on text elsewhere, and it seems a bit intense brightness-wise - and I'll likely end up buying myself a new monitor anyway (looked like there was a sale at Office Hole when I was looking for cards they no longer carried), but for now, I'm happy.
Now I'll probably shut down, put the side panel back on, and head bedward. Computer issues are exhausting. Fingers crossed it still boots fine tomorrow...