Waking Up Early
I woke up at 4:00am today. Not, “I dragged my ass out of bed…”, but I just woke up. Like I had slept all night. Not tired…my brain just said “We’ve had enough of this sleep shit for one night.” That kinda sucks because I usually cherish sleeping in as late as possible. I suppose that is what I get for going to bed at the reasonable hour of 10:45. 6 hours is my usual norm and I about clocked that. The good side of this is that I will get to work SUPER early and get to go home just as early…it being Friday and all.
But that leads me to the weekend which has me finishing tiling my kitchen and master bathroom….woohoo!
I’d rather sit around and play Painkiller especially now that I’m running with a 3GHz Prescott chip! I was forced 
to upgrade when my efforts to squeeze 2.9 GHz from my 2.4GHz Northwood ended in a fried L2 cache and that big beautiful screen o’ blue. The message, as always, was extremely informative and helpful: “Machine_Check_Exception.” Microsoft’s KB article was just as helpfull. Seems, according to them, that “…specific diagnosis of machine check exceptions is difficult, and there is no general solution.” SWEET!
Luckily I found some information about using Prime95 to stress test the system. This program is very nice in that it has specific routines that tax different parts of the system. You can choose to run functions that use the CPU mainly or primarily RAM or both. This and Microsoft’s Memory Diagnostic Tool let me rule out RAM as an issue. So I bit the bullet and went to Fry’s and came home with Señor Prescott! (speaking of Fry’s, I recently realized that I am a major geek when I, visiting Las Vegas, was thinking about how I could better spend my money at Fry’s than gambling..)
A couple of things about Señor Prescott.
- He’s a bit hot under the collar: around 50°C at idle
- 1 MB of cache comes in handy for games, but not much else as far as I can tell.
Let me also point out that if you have made it this far in this post, you either have A) nothing better to do, B) Believe good things come to those that wait, C) Are a really big geek too or D) All of the above.