Happy weekend folks!!

It's an absolutely gorgeous day here, breath-taking even. Of course, it's the cold that takes your breath away (and freezes boogers in your nose) but it's lovely nonetheless. The sun is shining, the sky is a gorgeous shade of blue and the roads are clear. It's great weather for running errands or walking around in, just as long as you are dressed properly. I truly don't hate this type of weather, I'm a sickie, I know, but it's true.

One of the errands we did this morning was exchanging our compaq (the cheapie one we bought at Futureshop on Boxing Day). The hard drive was pooched (ie scratched) and when Mark called them, they told him that he didn't need to bring the whole thing in, just the faulty drive. He returned the drive and was told that compaq would send a replacement drive, they'd call us when it was in. Well, they called yesterday and told us that they needed the whole unit back. This is a good thing because Mark's been doing upgrades to the machine with a replacement drive and it's still been wonky. Since Christmas, we've been collecting parts for Mum & Dad's machine.

One of our errands this morning was to pick up their machine. The one they have right now is my old 486 DX2. It was the first machine I bought, back in '93 or '94, prior to that I just lived in the computer labs at work. This morning we told them that we wanted to upgrade the machine they have. My dad was all, "well, in the spring we'll buy a new one, a good one..." yeah, right! He's just putting it off for some reason. What he doesn't realize is that between the parts we got from Pat, the stuff we have kicking around and the things we've bought over the past couple of weeks, they are going to have a kick-ass machine. We got them a new spiffy case, Pat gave us a chip set and a DVD drive. Mark's got a 60 GB drive kicking around, a new video card and some other stuff. We bought them a USB keyboard and mouse this morning. The whole thing is going to cost us less than $200 when it's done. We're not giving them a new monitor but they can get that themselves in the spring. The one they have is perfectly fine, it's just kind of small. If they want to get a 19" one, when they're on sale, they can. They also might need a new printer but seeing how printers are now almost cheaper than replacement cartridges, that shouldn't be an issue.

Mark's putting everything together right now. By this time tomorrow *fingers crossed* they should have a new machine. They're gonna be SOOOO surprised, I love it!!