The Ekpyrotic Universe

I intend to buy a new computer, but I have a processor question.

My current computer is 3-4 years old. It has a 3.39 Ghz processor and a gig of RAM.

The Dell I'm considering has a quad processor at 2.66 Ghz It'll have 4 Gig of RAM.

How do the 2 machines compare in speed? In other ways?

The day before yesterday I was playing City of Heroes when my monitor suddenly went black. I checked the PC and I could still hear it running, so it didn't simply turn off. I rebooted (the hard way, holding the power button for 8 seconds) and the monitor came back on and everything was fine for around 3 minutes when the monitor froze. I tried again, same way, and this time the monitor simply said "cannot read digital signal". One more time and got back to the 3 minutes ok, then freeze.

I turned the machine off for the night, thinking it could be overheating, the video card was going bad or the CPU was giving up the ghost. Yesterday I got canned air to clean out the machine and planned to switch to an analog cable to see if the problem was specifically digital. I blew a ton of dust out of the machine and cleared one of the screens on the back that had become completely covered in dust. Then I turned the monitor to gain access to the cables and lo and behold, the monitor cable had partially fallen out...

I'd priced out 2 machines yesterday: A Dell at $2100 and an HP at $1950. Fortunately, I think I won't need to buy either. I pushed the cable back in and everything seems to work fine. I started City of Heroes and was dismayed at the pixillation, but I'll try re-seating the cables on both ends and hope that makes a difference. I'd like to get 1 more year out of this machine. And at least now it is clean!

In a follow-up to yesterday's post about floppy disks, I went through the other box and managed to get rid of 90% of the disks in there. I now only have a few to check (comparatively) and will begin doing so as soon as I find the drive. I have a USB 3/5" external floppy drive, I just don't know where I packed it.

I finally got a new watch as all the ones I had had stopped working.
Here is the new watch click on 4GB to see the one I got. It is a nifty thing.
I'm still not used to wearing it and am checking my cellphone for the time.

It wasn't all that amusing at first, the guy had a heavy accent and I couldn't quite understand him. He also kept insisting he didn't have the wrong number and that he'd talked to me yesterday.
Eventually I found out he was looking for a photographer and asked him the name of the guy he wanted to talk to. It was not me.
Finally he said "Are you African?"
I said "No"
He laughed and said "What is going on?" and hung up.
I hope he wasn't charged to much for that call!

But I can get a powered exo-skeleton! Well, as soon as they start making them for taller people. The most amusing part of the article to me? This thing is wrapped around you and they're calling it the Robot Suit Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) exoskeleton. HAL? Really? I'm going to strap myself into a powered machine named after an insane computer. To make it even better, the company is CYBERDYNE. No news if they'll be starting Skynet soon.