After much delay, I finally went up to the girls' room to put Andrea's new computer together. She bought upgrades to hers, but with it including a new case, motherboard, CPU, and hard drive, to name some, it's basically just a whole new computer for $466, not including the video card, which we didn't upgrade.

I went up there and decided I was not going to do anything without the pleasure of music, though inferior her stereo may be to my computer speakers or car stereo, it was good enough. I had just downloaded Muse's "Showbiz" album featuring "Unintended" and "Muscle Museum", to name a couple, as well as an 8-track CD called "Showbiz - Bonus CD". I still had to burn them but my dad had taken over the computer with his pictures from his digital camera that he took for the hotel, which was the reason he went there. I made due with Andrea's new The Beach Boys CD: a 30-track CD with their best hits. I refound my liking of them as I started my plan with her computer. My first thought was to backup her irreplaceable files and since she doesn't have a CD burner, I'd have to put her new 30 GB (gigabyte) hard drive and copy them onto that. One problem: she has 3 hard drives in there already: one being 1 GB and the other 2 being 2 GB, and the 4th space being taken by her CD-Rom. Since all motherboards that I know of, including hers, only have 2 IDE ports, and only 2 devices at the most may be attached to an IDE port, a total of 4 hard drives and/or CD drives may connect to a computer's motherboard. This being true, I simply removed the CD-Rom and replaced it with the new hard drive, being sure to change the jumper on the back to "slave", since the hard drive it was sharing the IDE port with was undoubtedly the master. Upon booting Windows, I discovered that the hard drive was not present in the list of drives, meaning that it in fact did not contain a partition, or the very unlikely chance that it had an NTFS partition for Windows NT, 2000, or XP that Win98 could not read. I located the "command.com" file and started a window simulating MS-DOS and ran "fdisk" to create a partition. After doing so, I noticed it displayed it as having only 8 GB. I figured that it was because of the ribbon cable that connected it to the IDE port was of the older style and didn't have as many wires as the cable that came with the drive. Deciding not to remove the ribbon cable from this and the other drive sharing the IDE port, as well as disconnecting it from the IDE port itself and replacing it with the newer cable, risking the older hard drive it would also be connected to to not work, I just had the idea to worry about the backup until after I put the other computer together, and would then connect the 3 smaller hard drives to that computer and copy the files on that way, then take them out.

I took apart the new case, which by the way was a real pain due to the many screws holding each metal piece into place, and put the motherboard on the appropriate plate after installing the things that the motherboard screws into and also holds the motherboard away from touching the metal, except where the screws touch. I've never done that before since every other time they were already on the plate, but it wasn't too difficult, just time consuming. I put on the CPU (an Athlon XP 2500, grr, better than mine) after finally getting it out of the plastic case, the same as action figures come in, though this one was closed really tight, and even with pliers, it was a chore. I put on the fan, RAM, and connected the power and lights to it that show up on the front of the computer when it's on, is thinking, or whatever else it may have lights for. Sometime during this I got a chance to go downstairs and burn both Muse albums to CDs and listened to them once The Beach Boys were over. Did I mention I love Muse? And the best part is that almost no one knows what I'm talking about when I mention them. It's like I have something rare. But then I had to move my project to the side and out of the way because I was supposed to go with Randy to see that awesome movie again, and I also had to go with Tracy to a movie. I killed 2 birds with one stone and went with them both, and it actually made it funner. It was almost like going with a real group of friends, something I can't really remember ever doing. Anyway, the movie was really cool again, of course, but Tracy had to talk during it like always, but other people were, too. I played a game of DDR, beating "Super Star" easily this time (ha, take that!), but failed "Hysteria", convinced they changed the arrows on this version. Since I failed, I didn't get to play a third song and pick "Drop Out". That one's so fun. Anyway, that's my day. Tata.