I hit a speed bump in my migration from Windows to Xandros. It has nothing to do with Xandros; it was a hardware issue. The PC I was using had been given to me. I was told at the time that it had an incurable virus that nothing could remove. No problem. Tell Xandros to scrub the hard drive to bare metal and reformat as part of the installation.

Everything was working fine until I tried to download the SP1 for Xandros (an fifteen-hour download over a dial-up connection). About twelve hours into the download, the machine started to repeatedly reboot itself. I suspected a heat issue. The power supply looked pretty cheesy (typical for Gateway machines these days) and it was some sort of proprietary thing (again, typical of Gateway machines). I picked up a used machine here at work and spent a couple hours last night stripping all the usable parts out of my machine and combining them with the parts in the new machine. The end result was a Pentium III 650MHz with 256M of RAM, a 30G drive, a 10G drive, DVD player, and all the usual ports. Not the fastest machine, but it will be a good test of how Xandros will work on my laptop (Pentium III 700MHz).

While stripping down the old machine, out of curiosity I pulled the power supply and partially disassembled it. Nasty gross!! It was packed with nicotine-saturated dust. I'm not even sure the fan blades were turning, and even if they were, there was no way it was moving any air. The rest of the machine was spotless inside, so at some point, someone had the same idea I did and did a very thorough cleaning job, except for the most important part. Anyway, It's just as well that I got rid of the proprietary hardware and replaced it with something generic.

Again, Xandros is snappy even on old hardware. I can't wait to load it on Nestina's machine (Pentium IV 1.6GHz) and see how it runs there. I haven't had much time to play with it; as soon as I got Xandros installed, I set it to downloading the SP1. It's still running, even as I type this. I started it around midnight last night, and it still reported 8+ hours to go when I left for work this morning around 7:30am. This is a good test of many things, not the least of which is whether EarthLink will allow me to maintain a continuous connection and the continuous transfer of data for 15 hours straight. I think I will pay for the update on a CD for the other two installs. This is a good burn-in test for unknown hardware, but it isn't something that I would want to make a habit of.

Other than that, yesterday was just work and youth group. The high school group has essentially vanished now that school is out, but the smaller group (can you really call two people a group?) allows much more interaction, rather than just me talking.

And that's about it. I did add something to the bottom of this page. I never have cared what my "ranking" is as I always figured I knew everyone that read my blog. Well, I've gotten some comments and e-mail from people that I have no idea who they are, so I decided to see just how deep into the web my pearls of wisdom have penetrated. I signed up for The Truth Laid Bear Blogosphere Ecosystem. I need to wait until tomorrow for real statistics, but I'm sure I'll still be just an "Insignificant Microbe." I can live with that.

And that's all I have for today.