/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

So last weekend I decided that I wanted to play Forza 2 on the good ole 360. I pop the disc in and it starts, and I start going through the menus. Finally, it locks solid and I get the dreaded red ring of death. Now, this wasn’t the first time I had seen it. Bethany got it to red ring while playing Bioshock, but after some messing around it came back up. Unfortunately this time, it didn’t come back.

I called up XBox support, dreading the worst. Luckily for me, the guy on the other end was pretty decent. Within a few minutes, he determined that our 360 was eligible for the RRoD extended warranty and had a shipping box sent to us. 3 days later, the box arrived and I packaged the poor thing up and sent it on its way. I figured it would be at least 3 weeks until I heard anything, but as it turns out, they had the thing tested, fixed and sent out within 3 days of receipt. I’m happy to say that the 360 is on the way home. Whether or not it actually works is a whole other story

I know, I’ve been neglecting my blog of late, but that’s what happens when you get busy with other things. There isn’t a whole lot to report on, but I have been doing a little bit of geeking out. Last weekend I gave Bethany my XPS 600 desktop. Her old destop just wasn’t up to the tasks she was asking of it anymore, so I decided to set her up. I reformatted and put a fresh install of XP on it, transferred her old documents and now she’s happily plugging away. For the time being, I’ve got my laptop set up as a desktop, which is working out pretty well. But, for Father’s Day, I’ve got a new toy coming:

Dell Inspiron 530
Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600 (8MB L2 cache,2.4GHz,1066FSB)
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Radeon ATI HD 2600 XT 256MB
16X DVD+/-RW Drive

The only downside is the Radeon card, but I think I can manage as the Linux drivers from ATi/AMD are getting better with every release. The big thing I’m curious about is the quad core. I can’t wait to see how it performs under Linux. Part of me wants to install Gentoo just to see what it would do. Of course, people are going to ask why I went with Dell rather than building one of my own. It seems like it would cost just about the same to go either way. I’m not ashamed, so go ahead and dock me geek points :P