Over the weekend, besides processing photos from two weddings, I also was busy getting other stuff done as well as getting a new old PC built for a good friend. Like I said earlier, I’ve never owned a pre-built PC since I was 17 and probably will continue to do so even though Dell’s tempting me but I figure a custom built Media Center is still going to kick-ass. Anyways, I decided to stick with XP for this build cos I didn’t have an extra Vista license lying around but also to “try” ATI’s (AMD actually) Radeon 3450 which has great reviews for its price/performance. As it turns out, it didn’t like my Dell 2405FPW on the DVI port and only partially liked it on the analog VGA port. Worse, it didn’t like the E207WFP either and the only monitor it liked was the 2007FPW. Enough of that kind of crap. I drove out and got it swapped for an NVidia 8500GT. I’ve not encountered a video card that doesn’t POST on DVI before so for now, I’m sticking with anything NVidia. The Radeons can go to hell for all I care. Simply unacceptable.

After that little fiasco, the build proceeded so quickly, I mean Windows XP SP2, applications, patches (over 107 critical patches shows how old XP is!) and all that complete in just 2.5 hours 🙂