Technical difficulties—Please stand by...

Just a quickie post to note that as of last friday my PC has been malfunctioning somethin' fierce. It all started when I tried to print a web page and got a blue screen. Tried printing other stuff and got blue screened. I've been in relatively print-free mode for a while so I can't say when it actually last worked.

Thought a simple uninstall/reinstall of the printer would do the trick. And it did... Now I still can't print and the PC frequently freezes, crashes, or generally goes wacko. Often takes four or five reboots before it will remain operational enough to let me on the web. And even then after a while it'll just blacken the screen and lock up, forcing me to hard reboot.

Could try the old Windows reinstall either with or without hard drive reformat just for good measure, but that'd be a major headache with no guarantees. And besides which, even if it works I'd still have a seven year old machine with all sorts of suspect issues (in the back of my mind anyway).

So bottom line... Am investigating new PC possibilities, something better than 900 MHZ with 640M of RAM (maxed out) running Windows ME (w/IE6). I guess I can't really say the machine owes me anything. And how many other folks can say they've gotten seven years of continuous running out of ME?

Anyway, blog updates will likely be infrequent for a little while. With any luck, my next post will be from a new unit, but nothing's decided yet. In the meantime I try to get this old machine up and chugging at least once a day just to touch base and keep up with my core set of daily websites I most like to browse.

Going to a new PC will have its own headaches, of course, but I figure at least those headaches should (I hope) eventually result in a step forward to a much more current and better system that should serve for another three to five years rather than just get me back to where I was with a usable, but technologically obsolete system. And if things go well with a new one, then I can always tinker away at the old one at my leisure, maybe ending up with a usable spare system.