Ayarane Project

Countdown, but not of the Olbermann variety: 2 days until Windows 7!

LOL Best Buy, selling preorders on off-the-shelf machines with Win7 and free overnight shipping so you get your loot at noon Thursday. Oh wait… what? If I’m reading the Twelpforce tweets correctly… those of us who preordered in June ALSO get the free overnight shipping? :D? Squee! Well, I guess I’ll know for sure tomorrow if/when I get the email telling me my preorder’s shipped. :P Microsoft can keep their silly launch parties, mine will be powered by one of my pizza overlords. >:D

Also, Blastoise at least will be making the jump to… 64-bit! Yeah, he’s always been capable of 64-bit mode, but when I last transmigrated him, I wasn’t sure about how it would benefit me at the time. But now it seems there’s pretty much no reason NOT to make the jump, so might as well. All my crap will work in 64-bit mode anyway. (Pretty sure Iggy’s mobo is also 64-bit-capable, so he’ll take that path too.)

Also ALSO: It seems Dinah is more than capable of running Win7 (in either the 32 or 64-bit variety… though it’d be less-stressful for her if she did it in 32-bit mode). Our shared pile of Win7 copies includes an extra that mother is still on the fence about– if she opts not to upgrade Tiger, then Dinah gets the extra copy. Beware of shiny ninjas!

Less than a week until Windows 7 (and with it, the birth of Yggdrasil the Old Mahn/Robo-Fusoya). Hm. Odds are, Iggy will probably get built first since mother is likely to stall on moving her stuff off the main partitions until the very last minute. (Smart people either store their crap on another drive/partition to begin with, or at least consolidate it within the user folder! In the case of the latter, it’s simply a matter of click-dragging the user folder to the other partition.)

Iggy’s case arrived today. Not sure why Amazon put it in a box rather than ship it naked like other parts retailers tend to do with cases (they tape a makeshift or transparent envelope with the invoices and things inside). Oh well. All his parts are now here, I just need the OS and I’ll have myself a badass old guy. :D

I should probably prep his wallpaper, too (featuring, of course, his Avatar form)… I need to grab the resolution off my TV, though, as that’s what he’ll physically cap out at.

Iggy’s PSU arrived today. (Yesterday, his video card and Wifi dongle arrived.) Most likely, the case will hit tomorrow… thus it would be the earliest I could physically assemble my Robo-Fusoya of sorts (…I like this nickname XDDDD), even though I won’t really be able to do anything with him until Windows 7 hits next week, so I may as well just wait.

STILL debating if I should take out Blastoise’s secondary drive and feed it to Iggy, since Iggy IS taking over as the media server (and thus Blastoise can finally sleep at night). This is the other reason why I’m waiting to assemble Iggy. Additionally, this has an unintended consequence of Dinah not likely to be on as much, which I guess is okay.

He looks to be an easy build, really. The CPU/RAM’s already been done for me (BY ME… after all, Synergy was the first box I built from scratch and I pocketed the original mobo after practically rebuilding her when I stupidly overlooked a blown video card). It’s simply a matter of connecting the video card, hard drive, optical drive and throwing everything and the PSU in the case and pray that nothing explodes*.

Iggy’s not a true HTPC in the sense that he does not have a TV tuner card– it’s not really necessary since 1) I need only change the video source to get to TV mode, and 2) the TV doesn’t have picture-in-picture but I can certainly fake it by means of SlingPlayer. (Speaking of which… DEAR MICROSOFT: If you want to be extra-awesome, you could patch SlingPlayer support into Windows Media Center as an alternative to using a TV tuner card. :D Just saying.) I suppose if I REEEEEEALLY wanted to, I could add in a TV card later, but since I’m getting an HD capture box in December (and switching my DVR over to HDMI), what’s the point?

Anywho, time for some Conan.

* I’ve never actually had anything explode on the first bootup, though I have stupidly inverted the power/reset switch wiring.