R.I.P. - My PC

Sadly my computer died on Christmas Eve. In fact, this is the second time I've had a computer die over the Xmas holidays. The first time was 4 years ago when I returned home from Chicago only to find that I needed to replace my motherboard and CPU. This year's fiasco saw me doing some e-mail when it suddenly went out. After poking around, I discovered that the plug from the power supply that plugs into the mobo had two pins that were completely fried. The exact extent of the damage is unknown at this time but I suspect that the power supply and mobo are fried.

It was time for an upgrade anyway. The thermal grease on the CPU is dried and withered; the CPU runs only at a measley 1.93GHz; the ball bearings on my case fans tell me that they are not long of this earth; and Windows needed to be reinstalled. So Christmas will come late for me and I head out this evening in search of a deal.

I've got most of my data backed up so, in the event that my 3 hard drives are toast, I really won't lose very much. But it's going to be a lot of work. For starters, I've got to get used to Vista because, in all likelihood, I am going to get it on my new PC. Being an IT geek, I suspect that it will be a fairly short learning curve. I've actually looked at some of the new apps that come with it, especially those for organizing media – Windows Media Center, Photo Gallery, etc. – and it has reinforced the notion I got recently that my computer was incredibly unorganized. About 2 weeks ago I decided to try and make my MP3 collection make some sense by getting my act together with WinAmp.

I'd love to have an all-in-one media player but I just can't find one that really suits me. I have a boatload of music in lossless compression formats - .ape, .shn, and .flac. WinAmp has plug-ins for all these formats. I've always felt that WinAmp was sluggish when it came to video and I heard good things about VLC Media Player so I went with it. It plays pretty much anything including the new .mkv format which is becoming more common for HDTV quality video files. My computing life would be easier if I played only MP3 and AVI files. This is what I get for valuing quality over quantity.

So there I was trying to get my MP3 collection (and FLAC – it too carries metadata) organized with WinAmp a couple weeks ago. Having album covers to look at sounded neat so I started grabbing them. Somehow I ended up at an AOL Music search portal and couldn't find my way back to the normal media organizing bit. I'm dead certain that this is not a complicated maneuver but I just couldn't figure it out for the life of me and didn't have the heart to reinstall WinAmp.

In the grips of frustration, I read about Mozilla's Songbird, an open source media player. It had native FLAC capability and, being a Mozilla product, one could use add-ons such as the one which noted when bands in your music library were going to be playing in your town. So I loaded it. Much to my dismay, it had a footprint the size of Texas using, as it did, more memory than my browser after a long night of surfing the Web.

Thus ended my attempt at organizing my audio media. Will any of Vista's shiny new features help me organize my audio, video, and photos? Only The Shadow knows…

Before I attempt to organize anything, I am going to uninstall all the crap put on the PC like trial versions of anti-virus software, lite versions of DVD authoring apps that try to get you to buy the full version by letting you use a completely useless one, etc. After this I've got a list of essential programs I need on my computer. Anti-virus and anti-malware will come first. From there I've got about two dozen essential apps to install: media players, lossless audio compression apps & plug-ins, Firefox, Office, audio editing software, an FTP client, e-book readers (Adobe Reader, Microsoft Reader, and something to for .cbr files so I can read comic books), a file compression utility so I can deal with RARs, GIMP for photo editing, and on and on.

After that I'll throw some games on. I am really looking forward to being able to play Murder in the Abbey. I bought it a couple months ago but a new sound card and several e-mails with tech support later, I wasn't able to play. In fact, the tech support folks abandoned me.