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Showing posts from July, 2013

Fond thoughts about an old computer.

My wife's computer is acting up and as the self appointed "computer guy" in our house it is up to me to try and fix it. To be honest the ageing machine needs to be replaced but for assorted reasons we would like to nurse it along for another few months. I have a fondness for the old beast myself having built with my own hands. Almost every component has been replaced at some point so like Johnny Cash's Cadillac is defies any attempt to put a definitive date upon it's eclectic collection of parts. The oldest extant component is an ancient tower case dating from circa 2002. The Windows XP operating system was first installed in 2005 and the PSU and monitor hail from that same year. The processor was upgraded (to an Athlon 64 X2) in 2006 but the motherboard was replaced sometime in the intervening years. It still has 1 Gb of the original 2005 memory but the remaining 2Gb were added later, I suspect in 2010. The 7600GT graphics card comes from circa 200

Thinking of cancelling my Netflix account and starting a new one.

Grghhhhhh.  Netflix has finally become useless to me. My kids use Netflix a lot and they watch more TV than I do. The net result of this is that the viewing preferences reflect their tastes more than mine. Today I have the TV to myself and I am trying to find a movie to watch and I cannot find a single thing in the menus. Even the old reliable menus (Sci Fi, New releases, Recently added) have finally disappeared and all I get are suggestions like "Because You Watched Boy Girl Thing". This is despite my going into the preference menus and trying to tell it what movies I like. Obviously past history carries more weight than stated preference. There is no way to wipe the slate clean. There is no way to get a simple flat list of menus of the major genres. At this moment in time I hate Netflix. It is a particular cold form of hate that is reserved for automated systems that think they are cleverer than I am. Just give me the God damned tools to make my own mind up and