You ever have so much money that you just need to waste it on buying new things? Me either. But, sometimes older hardware goes crazy and you need to buy more. Now is one of those times.

I've been out of the hardware world for some time, so this is a call to anyone who is good at this sort of thing. I need help finding new hardware. Disks, RAM, that sort of crap - not a big issue, but I don't know what the status-quo is, nor do I know what top-of-the-line is.

So what should I be buying? Quad core? AMD? Intel? What are the current trends in motherboard chipsets? Any hardware recommendations?

Feel free to send me your recommendations over jabber, or email.

Thanks in advance

It's been an odd couple of days. I had decided to move a box from one outlet to another. Once everything was moved and plugged back in, I hit the power button only to be greeted by a high pitched whine and the smell of fire.

Yeah, the power supply went kaput. So I pulled it out, and left the box sitting there. This just happened to be my "always on" machine which managed my torrents, had my music shares, ran phrik (the lovable #archlinux bot), and kept a running irc connection.

Well, it's been a few days without perma-idling in IRC, and I've learned something. It makes me feel better to keep it off.

Being ever-present in IRC makes me think "man, I should check my IRC window, maybe something important happened / was said". This is simply not the case. Important things don't happen in IRC. Idle chatter does. Wasted time happens.

So, when all is said and done, I've decided not to idle in IRC anymore. I will miss some of the #archers banter, but all-in-all this is for the best.

Now, I just need to go buy a new power supply. Oh, and a bigger disk. Oh, and some of those. Oh, and that too. No, no, I'll take three.