Hopefully this is just the beginning and there’s another 99,900 left in this baby!

In December of 2003 I bought my first new car, a Mazda 6 which I’ve had for seven years. It’s been a hassle free, maintenance free, powerful driving machine that I’ve enjoyed immensely. But all good things must come to an end and today’s cars just aren’t meant to last for decades, so the search for a new car was in the works. Ironically, or perhaps more importantly, Donna’s car was coming apart at the seams. Transmission issues, window issues, AC issues and plenty of other things just weren’t working as expected or more to the point, just weren’t working at all. So it seemed the right time for some upgrades.

In looking over different cars and dealers, Kia percolated to the top as someone we wanted to deal with. They seemed keenly excited over us buying two cars at the same time. Pretty much everyone else had a "we might be able to do something for you" mentality. Giving us the cold shoulder during these economic times? Not exactly the business savvy I was expecting. Oh well, screw you hippies!

I’d been interested in the Hyundai Genesis, but found that Kia had a similar offering. Since Hyundai had snubbed us, the Forte was now at the top of the list. A quick test drive told me it was a car I wanted. Nice handling, a respectable amount of power and lots of fancy buttons on the dash. Clearly, the more buttons on the dash, the better a car is.

As we were test driving and mulling things over we realized we had to get one of our kids to work. We told them we’d be right back and to start getting all the papers ready. Perhaps to make sure we’d actually come back, they told me to take the Forte instead of my own car. I left my car on the lot and took theirs for a long test drive. And I liked it! And no it wasn’t like the scene out of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

A couple quick trips, an errand or two, and a spot of lunch and we were back at the dealer. Billy, the salesman, asked how I liked the car and which one I wanted. I jokingly made a comment about the one on the showroom floor. He came right back with "just the difference between manual and automatic". "It’s already got your name on it" he said with a big smile.

Now, keep in mind the cars on the showroom floor are a little different than the ones on the lot. At least that’s how I see it. That’s the way it was with my 6. It had upgraded components, better stereo, spoiler, sports package, upgraded seats, etc. Plus, since it’s in the showroom it usually has a better paintjob (clear coat) and no one gets to drive it. Plus it isn’t sitting in the sun or beaten by the elements.

The same was true of the Forte. It had upgraded components, a protective coat on the paint, upgraded tires, spoiler and other little niceties, not to mention the stereo system with has every abbreviation you can think of (MP3, CD, Sirius/XM, iPod, with speakers tucked away all over the place). From the way the sticker read it had about $3,500 in upgrades from where an SX automatic ends. You’re only going to charge me how much for this upgrade? Count me in!

When I bought my 6 they rolled it right out of the showroom. They did the same thing with the Forte. It got quite a few looks from customers and employees alike as they opened the doors and began moving cars out of the way. One guy, who happened to be looking at the Forte as they came over to drive it away, wondered what was going on. He asked me if I knew what happened. With a large smile, I told him they were getting my car ready.

While I was greatly amused with the purchase of a new car, I would be lying if I didn’t feel some sadness at leaving my Mazda 6 behind. I’ve put a lot of miles on that car, both figuratively and literally. There’s been a lot of ups and downs over the last seven years but the 6 was flawless through all of them. I’ve lived three different places in two different states, had a couple of jobs, lost a couple of friends and sent a couple kids off to college. Heck, I remember my kids playing the trunk of the 6 while I was signing the paperwork. They remember playing the trunk.

But I feel confident that Kia is going to tune it and wash it and make that 6 look new again. So if you’re in the market for a used car and happen to come across a white Mazda 6, be kind to her.

So the Racing Red Kia Forte SX is sitting in the driveway, highly polished and looking sporty. I wasn’t quite ready to get rid of the Mazda, but you never know when your mid-life crisis will kick in.

Canon White Lens Coffee Mug

Now the funny thing is, even though the ground is covered, this still will only for a couple of hours. It’s already melting and you can hear it runoff coming off the houses. That’s what’s great about these little blizzards; you get this great snowfall that covers everything, but in a few hours it’s all gone and life goes back to normal.

Want to see some more pictures? Check out the gallery.

This also proves to me that I need to ditch Virtual PC for Windows 7 for Virtualbox. VPC for Win 7 is junk and is just too much of a hassle. Virtualbox was so much easier to configure and actually works like the old VPC used to.

Going back to Ubuntu, there is no denying that installing apps in Windows is a far easier task than installing apps for Unix. There’s still tons of command line scripting going on in the Unix world and that alone is going to be an interesting learning curve. I had no problem getting system updates, but getting something like Thunderbird 3 on there was not just a simple double-click. And even when I did get Thunderbird working and downloading my email, the app is sitting on my desktop not in a “Program Files” type of location, so clearly not ideal.

Windows is usually really good for its ease of use, but as far as getting an OS installed which has a browser, word processing, image editing and network functionality, Ubuntu has proven itself to be just as easy and effective. It does come down to the apps, but if MS keeps pushing cloud computing the OS will lose its relevance since everything will be running out there.

While they aren’t the same, I really like what I see so far.

I started the install at 1:52pm and I was looking at my desktop at 2:19pm. This also includes the time it took to completely format the 640GB drive since it had Windows 7 64bit on it. I figure that took at least a few minutes so the actual install took about 20 minutes. As an aside, it did recognize that I had Windows 7 still on the drive and gave me the option to dual boot. I doubt Windows 7 would have been so kind.

I even got it to play AVI, WMV and MP3 files right off the bat. It’s a simple download to get the codecs. I was actually a little surprised by that.

I forgot that I could use Virtualbox to install a virtual copy of Windows or use WINE to try and run some apps for those times when I would need them. Looks like Virtualbox is the more likely choice since WINE doesn’t support Paint Shop Pro, or Live Writer. I doubt OneNote would work either, but a virtual machine isn’t the end of the world. I’m not quite ready to make the switch, but if this test bed works out Windows may be off this machine sooner rather than later.

So I decided to go completely radical and install Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on to it! I tried the 7.x series a few years back and found it rather convoluted when trying to install additional components. The OS itself worked great but adding additional components didn’t work so well. It seems the 9.x series has changed a lot of that so I think it’s time to jump in again.

Windows 7 is far from impressive and with new products like the iPad, Chrome OS, Mac OSX, Ubuntu and other yet unannounced products coming out later this year it seems the Windows revolution is coming to an end. And I have to say I’m not sad to see it go. I’m not going to be able to just quit using Windows, there’s still quite a few apps I still use like Paint Shop Pro, Live Writer, OneNote, Quicken, that just don’t have a Unix equivalent. However, I think Unix flavors will gain speed this upcoming year and I’m curious to have a look for myself. With the speed and memory of this new machine I could easily run Virtualbox with Windows 7 running inside. That probably seems redundant and maybe for the next year or so it will be, but I feel the winds of change coming on. Personally, I really hope Windows 7 is the last version of Windows I use. I find Win7 to be bloated, annoying, insanely expensive and short on real useful features. Plus, if everyone is moving to "cloud computing" what does it matter what OS I’m using? If I just need a browser why should I spend $150-400 on Windows?

I have my boot disc and a machine ready to go.This should be interesting!

It seems that both Windows and the AMD motherboard aren’t too keen on the two video cards I put in my new system. Although they are both recognized and the drivers were loaded, the second card was causing some problems and the machine would repeatedly freeze. The mouse would still move, but nothing would respond when you clicked on it. After dozens of reboots and threats of sending the machine back to Dell (in pieces) or at least out the window, I took a moment to pause and reflect on the situation. I’m not sure where my happy place is, but I was searching for it.

I eventually turned off the second video card through Device Manager and low and behold the problem went away. (That’s what you get for thinking!) Funny, this same config worked perfectly under Windows XP and a Dell Dimension, both of which are at least 5 years old. But alas, the modern hardware and modern OS soils itself and can’t make it work.

Disappointing to be sure, but at least I have two monitors working and the stupid thing isn’t locking up all the time. I’ll have to figure out how to get that card back up and running. I do have the drivers loaded for both cards, but there might be a BIOS setting I need to check. You know me, I just put both cards in there and turned the thing on. Why would I bother to check any settings? Manual? What manual?

I pressed on and got quite a few apps reinstalled, and with the video issue worked out the machine runs very well. Apps load very quickly although every time there was a slight hesitation I thought the machine had lost its mind again. But I have my photo and video apps back in place as well as the insanely bloated Office 2007.

It’s funny how the only 64bit app I have is Lightroom. It’s still a 32bit world out there. Although seriously, is a 64bit version of Word even necessary? Is copy and paste really going to be noticeably faster?

I also spent a ton of time rooting through old directories deleting files I haven’t touched since 2004. I’m pretty sure that HMTL 1.0 tutorial isn’t going to do me much good these days. I found old apps and zip files I didn’t even think I had. Who knows what else I’m going to find?

There’s still a long way to go before I feel comfortable with this machine. Codecs are still missing and there’s all those little apps you forget about until you need them. But, at the least the machine is running and I got my own stupidity in check. At least for now.

I’m not sure if I even need this new edition. I’m sure I’ll download the trial and see what it has to offer.

However, if you’re looking for a deal you can buy the new Paint Shop Pro X3 for $59. However, I have another trick up my sleeve. If you use the coupon BONUSBUCKS20 you will save another $20 off the price. Not 20%, but $20. So now you buy it and tell me how cool it is.

Paint Shop Pro X3

I wasted no time in removing the original 640GB hard drive and replacing it with my own 1.5TB and 1.0TB drives. Additionally I stuff in two video cards, one PCIe and the other PCI. The case is an absolute pain to work with and you need to be careful you don’t slice your finger off on all the exposed edges of bare metal. Fact of the matter is, there’s tons of extra room inside the case for more drives, but the odd design doesn’t allow for more than two. I suppose I could just "stack" them in there and hope they don’t start rattling around.

With the innards completely changed around I powered it back up and installed Windows 7. I admit Win7 did a great job of installing itself. It picked up all the drives and understood there were two video cards and three monitors hooked up. It loaded a basic set drivers and multimon was working without me having to configure anything. I need to actually install updated drivers but I liked how Windows got it right.

Funny thing is, I installed Windows and got several apps installed in less than an hour. You can’t actually get XP installed in an hour so that’s progress!

I didn’t get much done with it, but it’s still running even after I ripped it’s guts out and made all sorts of hardware changes. Tonight will be a frenzy of app installations. I got a few of the smaller apps done and even got Office 2007 on there, but there is still so much to install.

So what did I actually get you ask? An Athlon II X4 630 with 8GB of Ram. I added 2.5TB of drive space and two NVidia graphics cards (an 8500 and a 6200).