There's no such thing as a cheap hobby

I have been a very lazy blogger lately, and a very lazy knitter as well. There was an initial massive fit of startitis:

a sock:

this scarf:

another scarf:

then nothing. Apparently, I needed a little break from knitting.

I spent much of the last couple of weeks playing with Windows 7. I installed it on my old desktop and it's running more or less contentedly on a rickety box that just barely meets the minimum requirements. I've had 2 blue screens so far, both for no reason I could divine. Is adding songs to a playlist a crime in the new Windows World? It isn't in XP Land, my adoptive home. It became clear quite quickly that some upgrades were in order. It had been so long since I put this machine together that I forgot what was in it. I turned to a diagnostic app to refresh my memory, but in the end there was no substitute for having a look inside.
As you can see, I found lots of dust and no chance of good airflow. Oh, and buried under that, there were some computer parts:

• ASRock P4v88 mainboard
• P4 3.2 GHz processor (so-so)
• 1 GB RAM (not so good, but easily remedied)
• 64 GB AGP graphics card (really bad, both the size and the format)
• 15 GB 10,000rpm hard drive (the size sucks, the speed is nice though)
• 200 GB 7,200rpm hard drive (ok)
• 2 unused SATA slots (excellent, if only I had anything to plug into them)

Buying an equivalent system would only set you back about $200, since it's yesterday's yesterday's yesterday's model. The original purpose of this techie resurrection was to give me a chance to play with some new software by reviving an aging but functional box that was getting almost no use anyway. That is to say, this was supposed to be like raiding the pantry, making do with what I had. Well, you can guess how long that lasted. I went online and found a new (relatively speaking) graphics card and some extra memory. While I'm waiting for delivery, maybe I can get back to some knitting.