Great. Well, other than the occasional shouts of "Yo Adrienne!"

[captainsblog]

In my whirlwind day of Friday, I picked up the extra XP desktop machine we inherited a few months back. I'd connected it to an extra monitor, found some cheapo peripherals for it, downloaded way-overdue service packs to it and, eventually, even got it connected wireless to our internet. We planned to use it for some older-style programs that don't play well even with Vista, and maybe as an extra screen for a DVD when we're watching different things.  After a few weeks, it started giving bad messages, and in time, Windows Explorer crashed on every startup, no checkdisk or restore seemed to help, and finally it wouldn't even boot off the hard drive.

So I loaded it into the car and dropped it at Guruland early in the week. Late Thursday, Vinny called me, all excited- not because he'd fixed it (even though he had), but because of the secret surprise he found inside:

Do you have any idea what's in this thing?

A couple of bundles of hundreds from the Cali cartel using it as a drug mule? Nah, that was too much to hope for:

It's got RAMBUS! Google it! It's very rare!

So I did:

Direct Rambus DRAM or DRDRAM (sometimes just called Rambus DRAM or RDRAM) is a type of synchronous dynamic RAM. RDRAM was developed by Rambus inc., in the mid-1990s as a replacement for then-prevalent DIMM SDRAM memory architecture.

RDRAM was initially expected to become the standard in PC memory, especially after Intel agreed to license the Rambus technology for use with its future chipsets. Further, RDRAM was expected to become a standard for VRAM. However, RDRAM got embroiled in a standards war with an alternative technology - DDR SDRAM, quickly losing out on grounds of price, and, later on, performance. By the early 2000s, RDRAM was no longer supported by any mainstream computing architecture.

It gets wayyy TL;DR after that, but, wow! Cool! I think....

I asked him if he'd prefer to switch it out for something comparable if less exotic, and he thought about it a moment before declining. Picked it up late on Friday, reconnected everything, and it's now running faster than any XP Home machine I've ever run. The peripherals all plugged-and-played, and it's yet to blast through the back wall of Emily's room trying to get back to kill those godless Commies in Vietnam.