Well, I ended up only having two days off instead of three (i took someone’s shift today). The two days I had were spent fucking around with the computer. I decided to mess with partitions and install Mandrake Linux. I really tooled around my box, ending up with a fresh windows installation and weird drive letters. I now have windows installed on my g: drive, it’s kind of weird. Mandrake never really ended up working. I don’t think the boot loader was calling the partitions right and I think the linux partition was crossing the 8gb boundary, which I don’t think it particularly likes. However, I didn’t reinstall Office, I’m going with OpenOffice.org, Eudora and Mozilla to see how I get along without it. Clean installs are nice, they just take awhile to get things back. There were a couple things I forgot to back up like contacts in outlook and my bookmarks.
I picked up a couple of new optical drives as well. I used to have a dvd/cdr combo drive, but I was starting to get a lot more burn errors. I picked up a Pioneer 16X DVD drive and a LiteOn 32X cd writer. The dvd player is slot load, which is kind of cool and the cdr is a whole lot faster than my last one (<4 mins for a full burn comparted to >15).