“I love your frame,” isn’t something you want to hear when turning in a piece of artwork, but that’s the comment I received today when I turned my photos in for this Friday’s Spring for Art fundraiser in downtown Winston-Salem. If anyone is in the area and enjoys art, you might want to come out. It’s $50 for non-members.

I recently finished a major computer upgrade from 32 to 64 bit processing. Of course, it didn’t go without hitches. The first problem I had was figuring out how to make a raid system. My motherboard has specific SATA slots for it and trying to fit six hard drives and two optical drives isn’t easy even with an over-sized computer case. Fortunately, after harassing my friend for technical advice, I was able to overcome the problems and now have a RAID 5 system in place. My next problem was with Windows 7. I wasn’t aware that if you make changes to your computer it won’t let you use the product key to register because it thinks it’s on a different computer. After an hour-long phone conversation with a customer service rep, I was able to get another product key and register Windows 7 64 bit. After that, I thought I was free and clear, but my computer was acting very strange. It was taking over ten to fifteen minutes to reboot and sometimes it wouldn’t reboot at all. I finally diagnosed the problem that it was reading a different version of Windows on my old hard drive and was merging the two together forcing the long reboot. I had forgotten to format the hard drive because I was on the phone with the customer service rep. So I wiped the hard drive, reinstalled Windows 7 and was good to go.