Sic transit gloria mundi

[mdlbear]

Or in this case, sick computer glorious quiet. My ageing desktop machine has been dying noisly for some time; this afternoon it finally started failing reliably in the middle of starting Firefox.

It still sounded a lot like a thermal problem, but after pulling the heatsink and applying new grease it still froze at roughly the same point. Could still be a RAM problem, but it was a lot simpler to pull the hard drive and install it in the 800MHz mini-ITX system.

Took about half an hour to install a more recent kernel and reconfigure X, but it works fine. And it's a hell of a lot quieter. (Also about half the speed, but I can live with that for a while.) And I need to upgrade the RAM -- it's presently only 256MB.

Meanwhile, I've been hacking away at the text for About Bleeding Time and the Makefile in my Songs directory.